Les cinéastes québécois parlent d'eux-mêmes et de leur cinéma. L'essentiel du livre est constitué des entretiens avec 30 cinéastes, publiés au cours des années dans la revue ##Séquences##. Le lecteur devra donc tenir compte de la date des entretiens. A cela, pour chaque artiste, l'auteur a ajouté quelques notes biographiques, un aperçu critique d'environ deux pages, une filmographie et une bibliographie. [SDM].
Claude Jutra, best known as the director of Mon oncle Antoine, has been widely acclaimed as one of Canada's premier filmmakers. Despite this, there has been surprisingly little critical writing about his work and the context in which it was created and viewed. Jutra was a Quebec nationalist, and both he and his films were shaped by the changes in Quebec society during the Quiet Revolution and by the political tensions of the sixties and seventies. Though he died in 1986, his films still have much to tell us about Canadian cinema and the ongoing debates on Canadian and Quebec nationhood. Book jacket.
Martin Gignac et Jean-Marie Lanlo posent à six cinéastes représentatifs de la diversité du cinéma québécois actuel une même question : " Quel regard portez-vous sur le cinéma québécois? " Érik Canuel, Catherine Martin, Charles-Olivier Michaud, Noël Mitrani, Kim Nguyen et Rafaël Ouellet s'expriment sincèrement et sans concessions sur un art et un milieu qu'ils connaissent parfaitement. Les discussions abordent plusieurs thèmes (forces, faiblesses, cinéphilie, formation, etc.) et montrent à quel point notre cinéma est plus complexe que ne le laissent croire les quelques échos qui filtrent dans les médias. Grâce à ces échanges vivants et francs, Martin Gignac et Jean-Marie Lanlo convient le lecteur à participer virtuellement au débat en lui donnant accès à des points de vue tour à tour complémentaires et contradictoires. Par-dessus tout, les auteurs espèrent que la lecture de leur ouvrage donnera envie au lecteur d'aller à la rencontre de films trop souvent désertés par le public.
Quebecois cinema, too long neglected and too long unknown by American viewers, and often not appreciated on its own terrain, receives its well-deserved defense in Janis L. Pallister's The Cinema of Quebec: Masters in Their Own House.
Instead, he shows that while the allegory of nation marks Quebec film production, it also leads to a tension between textual and contextual forces, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, and between major and minor modes of being and identity.".
Containing 24 essays, each on a different film, this work provides a fascinating historical account of the development of film and documentary traditions across the diverse national and regional communities in Canada.
The Radio Eye: Cinema in the North Atlantic, 1958–1988, examines the way in which media experiments in Quebec, Newfoundland, the Faroe Islands, and the Irish-Gaelic-speaking communities of Ireland use film, video, and television to advocate for marginalized communities and often for “smaller languages.” The Radio Eye is not, however, a set of isolated case studies. Author Jerry White illustrates the degree to which these experiments are interconnected, sometimes implicitly but more often quite explicitly. Media makers in the North Atlantic during the period 1958–1988 were very aware of each other’s cultures and aspirations, and, by structuring the book in two interlocking parts, White illustrates the degree to which a common project emerged during those three decades. The book is bound together by White’s belief that these experiments are following in the idealism of Soviet silent filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who wrote about his notion of “the Radio Eye.” White also puts these experiments in the context of work by the Cuban filmmaker and theorist Julio García Espinosa and his notion of “imperfect cinema,” Jürgen Habermas and his notions of the “public sphere,” and Édourard Glissant’s ideas about “créolité” as the defining aspect of modern culture. This is a genuinely internationalist moment, and these experiments are in conversation with a wide array of thought across a number of languages.
Jean Pierre Lefebvre is one of the most inventive and prolific of all Canadian filmmakers. From the sixties to the eighties, his films were as much celebrated at international film festivals as are the films of Atom Egoyan today. More recently, Lefebvre has explored the creative potential of video as a visual medium. In Jean Pierre Lefebvre: Vidéaste, Peter Harcourt provides an overview of Lefebvre’s films and an incisive consideration of his five-part video project L’age des Images (1993-95). Two essays by Lefebvre, one a personal account of the influence of Québécois films on his work, the other an argument for a “national cinema”, along with a recent interview with him round out this timely look at a director of great distinction and emotive power. Published by the Toronto International Film Festival. Distributed in Canada by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Distributed outside Canada by Indiana University Press.
