The politics of Québec’s film crisis

Québec film is in crisis. Nearly everyone in the milieu will agree with this statement. However, what precisely is the nature of the crisis? Has it been created by the filmmakers or by the producers? How does the general economic crisis affect the production of film? Why is the feature film industry so dormant?

There is no single or simple reason for all of the above. There are a confluence of causes, some related to the national question, in Québec, some related to the specificity of the industry itself. But none are unique to this province. The na­tional question haunts every major filmmaking context, except Holly­wood. What do we mean when we say that we want Québec Film to reflects the aspirations and hopes of the Québécois? Do we mean the hopes of a particular class? Or do the divisions in our society mean nothing? Let us not forget and gloss over the most obvious. Film is an industrial product and as such, within our economic system, it remains in the control of a small minority. This control has a purpose and it is to make a profit. No matter what the State does, no matter how noble its aspirations might be, the economic realities of film will not change, unless they are, in the first instance recognized. Those who enter the “profession”, be they technicians or directors, may desire to be artists, may want to lead their culture to a more substantive understanding of itself, and may not at the same time “see” the contradictions of their own desires. To divorce political action from cultural action, is to neutralize both in a simple-minded way. That is, one cannot hope to create a new cinema, one which is truly rooted in the community from which it comes, wlthout creating that com­munity. One cannot enter the pro­fession and simply say, “presto”, give me a job, give me a place, to say what I want to say. I believe in Québec, let me make films about my beliefs. Contexts for the ex­pression of ideas are not simply created by wishing them into being. They can only be created through the kind of political work that the making of a film, especially a feature film, denies. For it is pre­cisely the very ambiguity of working with film itself, that the present crisis reveals. In the sixties, Québec film set about constructing and retrieving a lost past, a history of a people whose national identity was confused and suppressed. Using a mix between the documentary and the fictional, these films reflected the anxiety and the need to build an archive of what was absent. But it would be a jump in logic to suggest that the national movement had been strengthened by the cinema. In the first place if the communication of ideas were that simple or that direct, then we would ail be uncritical victims of the propaganda which is directed towards us. Secondly, even if a director thinks that he/she has put together a very simple message, it can be understood in a way that is quite opposite to the intention. So the films of the sixties did not reflect the community from which they came, nor did they create that community, rather, the films were an integral part of the community, in the same way as the very subjects that they depicted. Pierre Per­rault did not give us a reflection of, or a window onto the communities which he explored. Instead, he was inside what his films spoke about about.

Film, if anything, is a weak com­municator of ideas. Images are fragments. They are ambiguous. The viewer must disentangle a great deal to create some clarity. We are in a crisis because most of the film-makers now working (aside from someone like Jean Pierre Lefebvre) are suddenly stuck without a message. The simple clarity of many of the films from the sixties no longer works. The context and the environment has changed. The National Film Board has changed. The industry is even more hierarchically organized. The ethnographie period of the “direct” has ended. And so on.

Those in the profession have accepted its division of labour : they have accepted the absurdly inflated material costs of production: they have accepted the very industrial context that cannot meet their expressed needs. It does no good to blame the Institut, or the C.F.D.C., they represent precisely what the industry is about. Our filmmakers have silenced themselves because they don’t live in the Province, or State of Quebec, anymore. They live in THE PROVINCE OF FILM. They are silent because nationalism is just not enough to sustain creativity. Especially, if that nationalism does not try and recognize its own contradictions. They are silent because films is not the crucial arena within which the real political battles are going to be played out. They are silent because film is not the foundation upon which political work can be built. Finally, when they do speak, as Gilles Carle did with LES PLOUFFE, they return to a romanticized past, duplicating the most superficial of historical models. Or they blame the workers for denying them their dream, as Denys Arcand did with LE CONFORT ET L’INDIF­FÉRENCE, hurling abuse at the very people whom they had courted in the past, blaming them for the fact that Quebec is not independent.

The very filmmakers whose ex­pectations were so high, now find themselves confronting those ex­pectations. But they are not making films about their own anguish. Film­makers cannot have it both ways. The industry is what it is, run by profiteers. The crisis of Québec film is in part the resuit of the industry, but the more important question is, can those who see themselves as part of a profession recognize its essential bankrupcy? It is only through that recognition that we might begin the search for a completely new model for film produc­tion in Quebec.

Ron BURNETT
professor and
editor of Ciné-tracts