Pour La Suite Du Monde

Pour fa suite du monde (1963)

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His proposal, however, described a film quite unlike the one that was even­ tually made. It was originally to be a "TV drama without actors." Four pages of this particular proposal are reproduced in the introduction to Perrault's 199 2 annotated transcript of Pour fa suite du monde.3 The film bearing this tide is solidly ensconced in the canon of documentary films shot in the direct style, and from the time of its production on, Perrault always con­ demned fictional filmmaking emphatically and without hesitation. Thus the original proposal comes as a bit of a shock. It begins unsurprisingly enough with a couple of pages describing the way of life on the lIe-aux­ Coudres: the sailors and slcippers of the local wooden logging schooners (goilettes), the ferry and the old-time winter crossing on the ice-slciffs, the fishing of capelin, smelt, and loach, the beluga and the old hunt of living

Pour la suite du monde

memory, and above all the people with their colourful language, their story­ tellers, and their sages. But then, quite astoundingly, we read, "This film will not be a documentary, in that we are proposing a fictitious revival of the beluga trap. However, every episode, every anecdote, will be invented, imagined and played out by the islanders themselves, who will be called upon to live out their own legend in some way. In other words, the script will emerge along these lines as the film is being made." The proposal also laid Out the major compo­ nents of th~ storyline. The film would begin with the coming of winter and the last river-schooner trips of the season. Fate might intervene with a shipwreck, as it so often did. Differences among rhe islanders about the decline of their shipping business and how to deal with it would provide dramatic tension. The mid-Lenten mummers, vil­ lagers concealing their identities behind masks and costumes, would reveal more, as home truths were spoken without risk of discovery. At this point the community would decide to revive the Pour la suite du monde tradition of the beluga trap. Then the film would show everyone involved in cutting down saplings to construct the trap, the priest would deliver a sermon of suppOrt, and excitement would be felt throughout the community. Alexis Tremblay would go to Quebec City to discuss belugas with fishing industry people there, perhaps to develop the market. In the spring, the trap would be set up, and the blacksmith would forge spears and harpoons for the hunt. The climax would come with a successful catch, and a great celebration would ensue in the community. But this euphoria would be short-lived. The market for belugas would turn out to be too small. One day a young man would go out, cut down the sapling poles, and release a captured beluga. The legend would be over. The schooners would continue to ply their trade, faced by an equally uncertain future as the river gradually yielded to outside forces. The Story proposal ends: "But the present does not last. It is soon absorbed into the past. And so, we thought we would make a cinematographic memory available for posterity."

Pour la suite du monde

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Actually, at one stage in the life of the proposal, the fictional nature of the storyline was even more flagrant. Recent research by Louise Carriere in the Perrault archives at Laval University has unearthed a proposal to the NFB called Argumentpour un tilethiatrefilm .4 According to this, the revival of the beluga hunt was to be incorporated into a story about a young womm, Yolaine, returning to the island after a ten-year absence in Montreal, only to discover that her sister has recently been widowed by a shipwreck. Yolaine's response is to urge her sister to leave the islmd and come with her to Montreal, and the drama takes off from the tensions between the pull of modern life and the urge to preserve the heritage of the past. The irony is complete. Pour fa suite du monde was originally to have been a staged docu­ drama for television. So how did Perrault's proposal evolve into a cinema-direct documen­ tary? As Perrault tells it, he discussed his proposal with Roger Rolland, then director of Radio-Canada, who thought it might make for a co­ production with the NFB. Whether Rolland or someone at the NFB sug­ gested it first , the upshot was m introduction to Michel Brault, a cine­ matographer who had already acquired m international reputation for a new style of documentary. Brault's version of Perrault's film project is somewhat different from Perrault's and pushes Carriere's unearthed version even further. In his recollection, Perrault came to the NFB with a script complete with dialogues.5 And it was only after Brault's first visit to the islmd and a beguiling encounter with the garrulous Alexis Tremblay that

Brault recommended dropping the dialogues and making a film in the experimental direct style. Brault himself had already been involved in the production of a number of influential short films at the NFB in an improvised, unscripted style that was being developed by a new generation of independent filmmakers in France, Britain, and the United States. It used the new lightweight equip­ ment and high-speed film stock that were becoming available for such filmmaking. It relied on spontaneity, serendipity, and natural conditions. It extended the places and circumstances in which films were made, and it gave them an aura of authenticity that would later also enter the rhetorical repertoire of fic­ tional film production. Brault's reputation at the NFB had been made in a series of award-winning shortS documenting the emergence of a modern, urban Quebec dur­ ing what is now called the Quiet Revolution. 6 The landmark film was Les raquetteurs (1958), a seemingly inconsequential short about a snow- Les raquetteurs shoe festival in Sherbrooke. Dispensing with a voice-over commentary of authority, it features unrehearsed, undirected sequences of the various events md celebrations as they occurred. Using hand-held cameras md available light at different moments, it relies on the attentiveness of their operators to secure decisive moments illustrative of a community affirming its identity, and on the ingenuity of the editing team to produce something that would make sense to the viewer. Over a period of five years or so, similar short films were made in the French unit of the NFB in small teams where the division oflabour was often blurred. Indeed, credits would often list several directors of the film. This would come to be an importmt feature of not only the forthcoming film but mmy others in which Perrault was involved. But admiration for Les raquetteurs was to draw Brault into the company of an important ethnographic filmmaker from France, Jean Rouch. With Rouch, the newly emerging participatory style of ethnographic investigation had found a primary tool in cinema, and Brault's combination of technical know-how and cinematographic

sensitivity Wa5 exactly what Rouch needed to enhance his project. Brault worked on several of the canonical works of the new French movement called cinema-verite'? And he still to this day refers to his work with Rouch a5 pioneering. Brault describes his evolution thus:

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I think we can distinguish several stages in the mastery of the way we observe our society. First, there is observation at a distance or through win­ dows. That corresponds, if you like, to the voyeuristic side of Les petites medisances. 8 Next, you decide to get into a more intimate relationship with people, using other means. You get close to them . The result, using unperfected equipment, is Les raquetteurs. Next, you get into the confessional film, like Chronique d'un tte, constructing a kind of psychodrama with the people involved. Next, you meet the people and say to them, "Listen, we're coming into your world and we'll be making a film with you. " Now, believe me, that's something that can't be done if you don't have adequate equipment (if the technology is not ready, as before 1963). If you go into people's houses and ifyou have to set up spotlights and make a lot of noise, in that case you might a5 well go back to using telephoto lenses and watch life through windows-until you figure out a way to avoid dis­ turbing them ... With the right equipment, people go about their normal business and they end up forgetting about you. That's Pour La suite du monde.9 And so the scene was set for this collaboration between two Montrealers in their early thirties with converging agendas. Perrault, the romantic poet, the master of voice, had come into film from radio with a profound con­ viction about the primacy of the locally recorded spoken word as a vehicle for the testimony of precarious communities. His experience in film­ making with Bonniere had given him an opportunity to use his own poetic

sensibility to create commentarIes out of his encounters with communities in the lower St. Lawrence. But technical difficulties with the cumbersome recording equipment virtually wiped out the opportunities for local voices to provide a natural poetry from their own lived experience. Perrault's po­ etic voice prevailed over the voice of the other. Brault, the poet of images, the technical virtuoso, Wa5 central to this new film movement that sought to overcome barriers created by the complex, labour-intensive world of studio film production and its technology. Such barriers worked against spontaneity, authentic­ ity, and solidarity, values that many Quebec filmmakers, stimulated by evidence of a society rapidly changing around them, wanted to pro­ mote. After the excitement of the new, urban documentary shortS that helped the French unit make its mark on the international scene, and the discovery of a new aesthetic and technical in­ novations in his foreign adventures with Rouch and Ruspoli,lO Brault was ready for a voyage of discovery closer to home. The two visions came Pour fa suite du monde together. With the participation of Marcel Carriere, an experimentally minded sound technician who had already learned how to work with Brault's demanding, acrobatic style, a great col­ laborative adventure Wa5 to begin. The risks were enormous. Once Brault had convinced Perrault that the direct style should be adopted, he committed himself to acquiring the film­ making equipment he would need to film Alexis and other islanders speak­ ing naturally in their own words. This meant direct recording of the spoken word a5 the camera was filming. The principle of/etting the islanders create their own Story, described in the original proposal, remained intact to this extent. But the filmmaker was relea5ing a significant mea5ure of control over the pro-filmic event. The filmmakers might know what they wanted, but there Wa5 no guarantee on delivery, no prior agreement about what Wa5 to be said, who would say it, or how it would be phrased. People would no longer be playing a part assigned to them (a5 in the original docudrama

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Perrault had envisaged); they would play the part that came naturally to them. It was up to the filmmakers to find the community's leaders, the community's storytellers and poets, the lifelines and the fault lines of com­ munication, and to be present with their recording devices when things actually happened or when the force of the locally spoken word would give resonance and meaning to events. But there was no way of knowing whether the community would respond positively to the challenge placed before them, whether they would follow through with it once they did adopt it, or whether the hunt would be successful. Perrault and Brault each had his own ap­ proach to managing this risk. And they did not interpret the risk in quite the same way. Perrault's view was that once a collective en­ deavour seizes the imagination of a community and they decide to act on it to affirm themselves, the way the endeavour ends is unimportant. The subject of the film is the community's proclamaPour la suite du monde tion of itself, its engagement in the rituals and recitals that accompany collective self-affirma­ tion, and all the tensions that these processes will release. The outcome of the dramatic plot line is less important than the sense of progress toward a deeper understanding, both intellectually and affectively. We could re­ phrase that to say that underlying myths by which communities form and define themselves can be discovered regardless of the particular sequence of events through which they are expressed. II Equally, it can be said that a viewer's impulse to follow a series ofactions through to its conclusion (to see what happens next at each instant) is amply balanced by a desire to un­ derstand the meaning ofwhat is happening. So while in a direct documen­ tary the action and dialogue might be completely unpredictable and might even lose significance for the viewer, the satisfaction of the interpretive impulse would not have to be compromised and could even become the driving motivator for the viewer. I2 Brault's view was that the risk of the hunt's failure was less important in Pour La suite du monde, since the documentary tradition ofNFB film­

making did not rely on an assessment of box-office appeal. The need for certainty prior to the making of a film ought to be limited to confidence in the ability and sincerity of the filmmakers in relation to their project (and its budget). It was less important to make decisions on the basis of a dra­ matic structure determined ahead of time than it was to establish the inher­ ent interest of the subject matter with respect to the NFB'S mandate "to interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations."13 The tension and the risk were borne, perhaps, more by the community that staked its sense of itself on a successful accomplishment of its project. The risk that the filmmakers bore was of missing out on the events, the rituals, and the recitals that give such films their shape; of failing to register the meanings and the poetry of the experience in the cinematographic memory. Such a failure would not be attributable to the technical deficiencies of the equipment (though at times they were formidable) or to the incompetence or inexperience of the technical team (they were among the best in the

business). It was more a question of having luck on their side. They could so easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time; unrepeatable events could assume a life of their own, independent of the filmmakers. The colourful, figurative, memorable language of the islanders that both Perrault and Brault found so appealing might not emerge at the right moment for the tape recorder. It was all to be a matter of faith in the decisive moment, "the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression."14 And the faith was justified. The people of the commu­ nity that Perrault had come to know and love fell into recognizable roles: the patriarch, Alexis Tremblay; Marie Tremblay, his long-suffering wife and supporter; Louis Harvey (Grand-Louis), the mythQlogizer and reciter of rituals; Leopold Tremblay, the man of action and mobi­ lization; Abel Harvey, the old trapmaster who ran the last beluga traps of the 1920S before that market collapsed. Thanks to the initiative of Brault and Carriere, wading out behind Perrault into the river with their equipment, the film captures telling moments out on the sandbars in the middle of the river as the old pole-locations are found, as the new poles are set in place, as the community celebrates its exploits on the spot, and as the first beluga is caught. Thanks also to the playful inventiveness of Brault, who from time to time shot his own interludes alone and away from the action, the film has moments of lyrical signifi­ cance, such as the scenes with the village children with their model boats, or in the dandelion fields, or in the barn with the rolling tires. And thanks to the experience of the NFB'S foremost editor in this style, Werner Nold, the lyrical moments add poetic weight and stature to the film. Pour la suite du monde

The storyline, while conforming in btoad terms to essentials of the original project that Perrault had submit­ ted in 1960 to Radio-Canada, would take its own shape. The story of the trap was built around the gradual mobi­ lization of the community, the construction of the trap, and the eventual capture of a beluga. That did not change. The extended material on the wooden schooners at the be­ ginning was dropped, except for the raising of the buoys to indicate the coming of winter immediately after the credit sequence. The slow death of the schooners would be the . d'eau (6) ' · 0 f a Iater filI m, L es voztures su bJect 19 9· The d eCldPour la dsuite umon e sion to launch the revival of the hunt was made much ear­ lier in the film's Story, and the mid-Lenten mummers would primarily add material to the stock of annual community rituals scattered through the film, instead of revealing latent tensions. Sequences showing the saplings being cut and shaped into poles were not shot, nor did Alexis visit Quebec City. The result of these omissions was that the location of the old pole­ lines and the setting of the trap takes up considerably more time, a happy outcome since these activities provide the most memorable and haunting scenes of the film. The climax comes as planned, with the successful cap­ ture ofa beluga, and is followed by its delivery to an aquarium in New York. The sense ofloss in the ending of the original proposal is muted. Nobody goes Olit to cut down the poles, but the islanders are compelled to acknowl­ edge that their catch has been far less successful than they had hoped. But there is always next year. This was the film that made Perrault's reputation and consolidated Brault's. It enabled Perrault to add filmmaking to his poetic career, and as such it demands careful attention to its form and rhetoric. What follows here is a schematic summary ofwhat I have written elsewhere. 15Essentially, the film operates on two chronological levels. The key storyline traces the revival of the beluga trap that had been abandoned since the 1920S. It takes what appears to be the better part of a year. A series of encounters between Leopold Tremblay and the "elders" of the community secures agreement for the project. A public meeting estab­ lishes the New Beluga Fishery Company, with its island shareholders each

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contributing so many poles to the project, and the spring thaw sees the community getting involved in the construction of the eight-kilometre ser­ pentine line ofsaplings that form the trap. Patient patrols of the trap finally payoff when a beluga is spotted and the villagers can bring the porpoise­ sized mammal to shore, virtually by hand. The live beluga is sold to the New York aquarium for public display, and the Tremblays take it down there themselves by road. Threaded into this story is a sequence of annual customs and rituals that give definition and continuity to the community's sense of itself. In the first place, this sequence serves to remind the viewer of the passage of time and the seasons (from end of fall to end of fall); it alludes to the sea­ sonal round of activities in the island's economy, whether sailing, fishing, or agriculture; and it incorporates moments of the liturgical yea(, espe­ cially Lent and Easter. Twice in the film, the influence of the moon becomes a focus of conver­ sation. 16 In the world of the old captain, Joachim Harvey, and the patri­ arch, Alexis Tremblay, everything in nature depends on the lunar cycles. 17 They influence the growing seasons and the fertility cycles. Alexis cites folk wisdom that fishing is more plentiful during a new moon than a full moon. At various times throughout the film we become conscious of how the tidal cycles affect navigation and the timing of the beluga trap, and the features of the liturgical year influenced by the moon are foregrounded, toO. 18 I have suggested elsewhere that this self-conscious revival of ancient folkways and exploits, and the storytelling that accompanied them, showed how rural Quebec could speak to urban Quebec. 19 Pour fa suite du monde was not an entertaining piece of folklore but an effort to stimulate aware­ ness about identity, community, and nationhood in a changing world, to raise questions about the prospects of survival when the sense of a collective past is threatened with oblivion. That survival was by no means secure. Nor was the sense of a collective past. The beluga hunt is attributed by Grand­ Louis and Alexis Tremblay to the native peoples and by a younger genera­ tion to fishers from the north of France.20 So is this community-forming event something that links the islanders to the peoples already here when the French arrived or to the old country, mother France? Are identities formed by geography or by history? Are they indigenous or can they be

exogenous? The next film that Perrault was to make would address these questions.

Le regne du jour (1966)

It does not appear that Perrault had plans to make a defined trilogy of fea­ tures about the islanders of the Iie-aux-Coudres when he undertook the film that became Pour fa suite du monde. Indeed, he tells how Michel Brault, once the film had been shot, felt that the whole thing had been a fluke and that such good fortune was unlikely to come around again for a long time. Perrault says he almost thought so, toO, for he had returned to his radio shows. 21 But was it a fluke? And was Perrault hesitant about his cinematographic future? The record now shows that by the end of J964, before his appointment to the NFB, he already had four projects under consideration there. The first of these, Le chemin qui marche, a view of the moving road of the St. Lawrence, was later dropped and would only emerge rwenty years later, greatly changed, as La grande allure. 22 The second was Les goeLettes, a title that had been already used in the Neufoe-France series and was to be changed to Les voitures d'eau. The third was

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