Pour La Suite Du Monde

8/14/2019 Pour La Suite Du Monde

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Pour fa suite du monde (1963)His proposal, however, described a film quite unlike the one that was eventually made. It was originally to be a "TV drama wit hout actors." Four pagesof this particular proposal are reproduced in the introduction to Perrault's1992 annotated transcript of Pour fa suite du monde.3 The film bearing thistide is solidly ensconced in the canon of documentary films shot in thedirect style, and from the time of its production on, Perrault always condemned fictional filmmaking emphatically and with out hesitation. Thusthe original proposal comes as a bit of a shock. It begins unsurprisinglyenough with a couple of pages describing the way of life on the lIe-auxCoudres: the sailors and slcippers of the local wooden logging schooners(goilettes), the ferry and the old-t ime winter crossing on the ice-slciffs, thefishing 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 thei r colourful language, their storytellers, and their sages. But then , qui te astoundingly, we read, "This filmwill not be a documentary, in that we are proposing a fictitious revival ofthe beluga trap. However, every episode, every anecdote, will be invented,imagined and played ou t by the islanders themselves, who will be calledupon to live out their own legend in some way. In other words, the scriptwill emerge along these lines as the film is being made."The proposal also laid Out the major components of t h ~ storyline. The film would begin withthe coming of winter and the last river-schoonertrips of the season. Fate might intervene with ashipwreck, as it so often did. Differences amongrhe islanders about the decline of their shippingbusiness and how to deal with it would providedramatic tension. The mid-Lenten mummers, villagers concealing their identities behind masksand costumes, would reveal more, as home truthswere spoken without risk of discovery. At thispoint the communitywould decide to revive the Pour la suite du mondetradition of the beluga trap. Then the film wouldshow everyone involved in cutting down saplings to construct the trap, thepriest would deliver a sermon of suppOrt, and excitement would be feltthroughout the community. Alexis Tremblay would go to Quebec City todiscuss belugas with fishing industry people there, perhaps to develop themarket. In the spring, the trap would be set up, and the blacksmith wouldforge spears and harpoons for the hunt. The climax would come with asuccessful catch, and a great celebration would ensue in the community.But this euphoria would be short-lived. The market for belugas would turnout to be too small. One day a young man would go out, cut down thesapling poles, and release a captured beluga. The legend would be over. Theschooners would continue to ply their trade, faced by an equally uncertainfuture as the river gradually yielded to outside forces. The Story proposalends: "But the present does not last. It is soon absorbed into the past. Andso, we thought we would make a cinematographic memory available forposterity."


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Pour la suite du mondeActually, at one stage in the life of the proposal, the fictional nature of

the storyline was even more flagrant. Recent research by Louise Carriere inthe Perrault archives at Laval University has unearthed a proposal to theNFB called Argumentpour un tilethiatre film .4 According to this, the revivalof the beluga hunt was to be incorporated into a story about a youngwomm,Yolaine, returning to the island after a ten-year absence in Montreal ,only to discover that her sister has recentl y been widowed by a shipwreck.Yolaine's response is to urge her sister to leave the islmd and come with herto Montreal, and the drama takes off from the tensions between the pull ofmodern life and the urge to preserve the heritage of the past.The irony iscomplete. Pour fa suite du mondewas originally to have been a staged docudrama for television.So how did Perrault's proposal evolve into a cinema-direct documentary? As Perrault tells it, he discussed his proposal with Roger Rolland,then director of Radio-Canada, who thought it might make for a coproduction with the NFB. Whether Rolland or someone at the NFB suggested it first , the upshot was m introduction to Michel Brault, a cinematographer who had already acquired m international reputation for anew style of documentary. Brault's version of Perrault 's film project issomewhat different from Perrault's and pushes Carriere's unearthed versioneven further. In his recollection, Perrault came to the NFB with a scriptcomplete with dialogues.5 And it was only after Brault's first visit to theislmd and a beguiling encounter w ith the garrulous Alexis Tremblay that

Brault recommended dropping the dialogues and making a film in theexperimental direct style.

Brault himself had already been involved in the production of a numberof influential short films at the NFB in an improvised, unscripted style thatwas being developed by a new generation of independen t filmmakers inFrance, Britain, and the United States. It used the new lightweight equipment and high-speed film stock that were becoming available for suchfilmmaking. It relied on spontaneity, serendipity,and natural conditions. It extended the places andcircumstances in which films were made, and itgave them an aura of authenticity that wouldlater also enter the rhetorical repertoire of fictional film production.

Brault's reputation at the NFB had been madein a series of award-winning shortS documenti ngthe emergence of a modern, urban Quebec during what is now called the Quiet Revolution.6The landmark film was Les raquetteurs (1958) , aseemingly inconsequential short about a snow- Les raquetteursshoe festival in Sherbrooke. Dispensing with avoice-over commentary of authority, it features unrehearsed, undirectedsequences of the various events md celebrations as they occurred. Usinghand-held cameras md available light at different moments, it relies on theattentiveness of their operators to secure decisive moments illustrative of acommu nity affirming its identity, and on the ingenuity of the editing teamto produce som ething t hat would make sense to the viewer. Over a periodof five years or so, similar short films were made in the French unit of theNFB in small teams where the division oflabour was often blurred. Indeed,credits would often list several directors of the film. This would come to bean importmt feature of not only the forthcoming film but mmy others inwhich Perrault was involved. But admiration for Les raquetteurs was todraw Brault into the company of an important ethnographic filmmakerfrom France, Jean Rouch. With Rouch, the newly emerging participatorystyle of ethnographic investigation had found a primary tool in cinema,and Brault's combination of technical know-how and cinematographic


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Perrault had envisaged); they would play the part that came naturally tothem. It was up to the filmmakers to find the community's leaders, thecommunity's storytellers and poets, the lifelines and the fault lines of communication, and to be present with their recording devices when thingsactually happened or when the force of the locally spoken word would giveresonance and meaning to events. But there was no way of knowingwhether the commun ity would respond positively to the challenge placed

before them, whether they would follow throughwith it once they did adopt it , or whether thehunt would be successful.

Perrault and Brault each had his own approach to managing this risk. And they did notinterpret the risk in quite the same way.

Perrault's view was that once a collective endeavour seizes the imagination of a communityand they decide to act on it to affirm themselves,the way the endeavour ends is unimportant. Thesubject of the film is the community's proclama-

Pour la suite du monde tion of itself, its engagement in the rituals andrecitals that accompany collective self-affirma

tion, and all the tensions that these processes will release. The outcomeof the dramatic plot line is less importan t than the senseof progress towarda deeper understanding, both intellectually and affectively. We coul d rephrase that to say that underlying myths by which communities form anddefine themselves can be discovered regardless of the particular sequenceof events through which they are expressed. I Equally, it can be said that aviewer's impulse to follow a series of actions through to its conclusion (t osee what happens next at each instant) is amply balanced by a desire to un derstand the meaning of what is happening. So while in a direct documentary the action and dialogue might be completely unpredictable and mighteven lose significance for the viewer, the satisfaction of the interpretiveimpulse would not have to be compromised and could even become thedriving motivator for the viewer. 2

Brault's view was that the risk of the hunt's failure was less importantin Pour La suite du monde, since the documentary tradition ofNFB film

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making did not rely on an assessment of box-office appeal. The need forcertainty prior to the making of a film ought to be limited to confidence inthe ability and sincerity of the filmmakers in relation to their project (andits budget). It was less important to make decisions on the basis of a dramatic structure determined ahead of time than it was to establish the inherent interest of the subject matter with respect to the NFB'S mandate "tointerpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations."13 The tension andthe risk were borne, perhaps, more by the community that staked its senseof itself on a successful accomplishme nt of its project. The risk that thefilmmakers bore was of missing out on the events, the rituals, and therecitals that give such films their shape; of failing to register the meaningsand the poetry of the experience in the cinematographic memory. Sucha failure would not be attributable to the technical deficiencies of theequipment (though at times they were formidable) or to the incompetenceor inexperience of the technical team (they were among the best in the


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business). It was more a question of having luck on theirside. They could so easily be in the wrong place at thewrong time; unrepeatable events could assume a life oftheir own, independent of the filmmakers. The colourful,figurative, memorable language of the islanders that bothPerrault and Brault found so appealing might not emergeat the right moment for the tape recorder. It was all to be amatter of faith in the decisive moment, "the simultaneousrecognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance ofan event as well as the precise organization of forms whichgives 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 intorecognizable roles: the patriarch, Alexis Tremblay; MarieTremblay, his long-suffering wife and supporter; LouisHarvey (Grand-Louis), the mythQlogizer and reciter ofrituals; Leopold Tremblay, the man of action and mobilization; Abel Harvey, the old trapmaster who ran the lastbeluga traps of the 1920S before that market collapsed.Thanks to the initiative of Brault and Carriere, wading outbehind Perrault into the river with their equipment, thefilm captures telling moments out on the sandbars in themiddle of the river as the old pole-locations are found, asthe new poles are set in place, as the comm unity celebratesits exploits on the spot, and as the first beluga is caught.Thanks also to the playful inventiveness of Brault, whofrom time to time shot his own interludes alone and awayfrom the action, the film has moments of lyrical significance, such as the scenes with the village children withtheir model boats, or in the dandelion fields, or in thebarn with the rolling tires. And thanks to the experienceof the NFB'S foremost editor in this style, Werner Nold,the lyrical moments add poetic weight and stature to thefilm.Pour la suite du monde

The storyline, while conforming in btoad terms toessentials of the original project that Perrault had submitted in 1960 to Radio-Canada, would take its own shape.The story of the trap was built around the gradual mobilization 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 beginning was dropped, except for the raising of the buoys toindicate the coming of winter immediately after the creditsequence. The slow death of the schooners would be the

b f I fil L . d' (6) Th d' Pour la suitesu Ject 0 a ater I m, es voztures eau 19 9 e eCl- d dumon esion to launch the revival of the hunt was made much earlier in the film's Story, and the mid-Lenten mummers would primarily addmaterial to the stock of annual community rituals scattered through thefilm, instead of revealing latent tensions. Sequences showing the saplingsbeing cut and shaped into poles were not shot, nor did Alexis visit QuebecCity. The result of these omissions was that the location of the old polelines and the setting of the trap takes up considerably more time, a happyoutcome since these activities provide the most memorable and hauntingscenes of the film. The climax comes as planned, with the successful capture of a 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. Nobodygoes Olit to cut dow n the poles, but the islanders are compelled to acknowledge that their catch has been far less successful than they h ad hoped. Butthere is always next year.

This was the film that made Perrault's reputation and consolidatedBrault's. It enabled Perrault to add filmmaking to his poetic career, and assuch it demands careful attention to its form and rhetoric. What followshere 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 beenabandoned since the 1920S. It takes what appears to be the better part of ayear. A series of encounters between Leopold Tremblay and the "elders" ofthe com muni ty secures agreement for the project. A public meeting establishes 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 thecommunitygetting involved in the construction of the eight-kilometre serpentine line of saplings that form the trap. Patient patrols of the trap finallypayoff when a beluga is spotted and the villagers can bring the porpoisesized mammal to shore, virtually by hand. The live beluga is sold to the Ne wYork aquarium for public display, and the Tremblays take it down therethemselves by road.Threaded into this story is a sequence of annual customs and ritualsthat give definition and continuity to the community's sense of itself. Inthe first place, this sequence serves to remind the viewer of the passage oftime and the seasons (from end of fall to end of fall); it alludes to the seasonal round of activities in the island's economy, whether sailing, fishing,or agriculture; and it incorporates moments of the liturgical yea(, especially Lent and Easter.

Twice in the film, the influ ence of the moon becomes a focus of conversation.16 In the world of the old captain, Joachim Harvey, and the patriarch, Alexis Tremblay, everything in nature depends on the lunar cycles. 17They influence the growing seasons and the fertility cycles. Alexis cites folkwisdom th at fishing is more plentiful during a new moon than a full moon.At various times throughout the film we become conscious of how the tidalcycles affect navigatio n and the timing of the beluga trap, and the featuresof the liturgical year influenced by the moon are foregrounded, toO. 18

I have suggested elsewhere that this self-conscious revival of ancientfolkways and exploits, and the storytelling that accompanied them, showedhow rural Quebec could speak to urban Quebec.19 Pour fa suite du mondewas not an entertaini ng piece of folklore bu t an effort to stimulate awareness about identity, communi ty, and nationhood in a changing world, toraise question s about the prospects of survival when the sense of a collectivepast is threatened with oblivion. That survival was by no mean s secure. Norwas the sense of a collective past. The beluga hunt is attributed by GrandLouis and Alexis Tremblay to the native peoples and by a younger generation to fishers from the north of France.20 So is this community-formingevent something that links the islanders to the peoples already here whenthe French arrived or to the old country, mother France? Are identitiesformed by geography or by history? Are they indigenous or can they be

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

Le regne du jour (1966)It does not appear that Perrault had plans to make a defined trilogy of features about the islanders of the Iie-aux-Coudres when he undertook thefilm that became Pour fa suite du monde. Indeed, he tells how MichelBrault, once the film had been shot, felt that the whole thing had beena fluke and that such good fortune was unlikely to come around again for along time. Perrault says he almost thought so, toO, for he had returned tohis radio shows.21 But was it a fluke? And was Perrault hesitant about hiscinematographic future?

The record now shows that by the end of J964, before hisappointment to the NFB, he already had four projectsunder consideration there. Th e first of these, Lechemin qui marche, a view of the moving road ofthe St. Lawrence, was later drop ped and wouldonly emerge rwenty years later, greatlychanged, as La grande allure. 22 The secondwas Les goeLettes, a title that had been alreadyused in the Neufoe-France series and was to bechanged to Les voitures d'eau. The third was

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Pour La Suite Du Monde