Offscreen Notes
Michel Brault: 1928-2013
A huge chunk of Quebec and world cinema history comes to an end with the death of Michel Brault, who succumbed to a heart attack on September 21, 2013 at the age of 85.
As has been often stated, Michel Brault was at the forefront of the great cinéma vérité movement of the late 1950s, early 1960s. As a cinematographer for such seminal films and figures as Jean Rouch (who asked him to come shoot his groundbreaking Chronicle of a Summer in Paris in 1960 after meeting him at a Robert Flaherty Seminar), Claude Jutra, Pierre Perrault, and others, Brault was arguably the most important single figure of this vastly important film revolution, helping to innovate techniques such as the hand-held camera (or shoulder-mounted is more accurate) and the lightweight sync sound camera/sound system which would become an integral part of the cinéma vérite filmmaker’s arsenal. Brault was there as one of the creative forces at the French Unit of the NFB in the 1950s and 1960s, which pioneered the techniques and strategies which would cement the French style/version of the cinéma vérité film movement (in English Canada and the United States this movement is usually called Direct Cinema and features a slightly different ‘less intrusive’ philosophical approach to the form). Brault’s legacy includes the collaboratively made Quebec cinéma vérité classics Les Raquetteurs (1958), Golden Gloves (1961), and La Lutte (1961); was a collaborator with Pierre Perrault and Marcel Carrière on the wonderful Pour la suite du monde (1964) and again with Perrault on L’acadie, L’acadie (1971).
The cinéma vérité movement may have began as a non-fiction movement but quickly became appropriated as a stylistic trope in fiction film; and Brault himself moved easily between the worlds of fiction and non-fiction, shooting such important Quebec fiction films as Claude Jutra’s debut feature À tout prendre (1961), Jutra’s Canadian classic Mon Oncle Antoine (a film which is often voted as the greatest Canadian film ever), Jutra’s Kamouraska (1972), Les bons débarras (Francis Mankiewicz, 1980), his own directed feature Entre la mer et l’eau douce (1972), and brilliantly fusing fiction and non-fiction in his Cannes Festival award winning 1974 directed film about the October Crisis, Les Ordres (undoubtedly one of the ten great Canadian films of all-time). All in all Brault contributed to over 200 short and feature length films, a legacy which will be tough to surpass for any future Quebec-based filmmaker.
I met the man briefly when he was at my University for a master class, and got to shake his hand and exchange a few pleasantries. More than this casual meeting, I am pleased to say that I appeared in a film with Brault, sort of. In 2006 I was interviewed for the Canadian documentary series “On Screen” for their episode on Mon Oncle Antoine (1971). In the documentary I make a point about how an establishing shot that pans across the mining area and then zooms into a close-up of the town’s church makes a political point visually by connecting the minority English owned mine to the Church hierarchy (for an extended reading of my thoughts on this film I point the reader to an essay I wrote on Mon Oncle Antoine). The documentary aired on television once or twice and can now be seen as a supplementary feature on the Criterion DVD edition of Mon Oncle Antoine. I could not have been happier when I eventually saw the documentary in its final edited form and discovered that my segment was directly followed by Brault himself corroborating my point, saying, “A zoom is a very significant tool. It has to have a reason to exist. It has to mean something.” Fitting from a man whose life has meant a lot to the world of cinema.
