“Kinostalgia” is the title of a monthly column dedicated to repertory cinema, in which critic Victor Morozov picks well-known or undiscovered samples from the history of film and analyzes them from a fresh perspective. Today you can read about two masterpieces by the Canadian documentary filmmaker Pierre Perrault.

No single history of documentary cinema can ignore the name of Canadian filmmaker Pierre Perrault. Why is Perrault so important? It’s because he understood the substantial part of a myth which, even in a world that has experienced the atomic bomb and other atrocities, still governs our lives more or less consciously, and then he let it bloom in front of the camera. Paradoxically, his documentaries run afoul of any attempt at a demystifying lynching: they are there to revive the spell of popular beliefs, those that move the world from a grassroots level and have been doing so for the longest time. This leniency, which is doubled by a fascination in a system of values that is not quite his, is sensibly activated by Perrault from film to film. In contrast to other ethnographic documentaries, Perrault aligns himself with a gaze that mixes itself, but only up to a certain point, up with the things that are starting to take shape in front of his lens. More transparent than Robert Flaherty – who, in Man of Aran, reinvented shark fishing, forcing the local islanders to reconstruct a ritual that had already disappeared for many years, which he then sold as being authentic -, more mercurial than Jean Rouch – who, in his documentaries, would explicitly underline the difference between the white intruder and the impenetrable beliefs of the African people -, Perrault allows his films to be invaded by a sense of controlled drunkenness, which makes us suddenly believe in fabulous worlds once more, even though we know very well that they are nothing but illusory.

In 1963, Perrault associated himself with the more experimentally-minded Michel Brault to work on an ethnographic documentary about L’Île-aux-Coudres, an isolated territory that lies north of the region of Quebec. Pour la suite du monde, the first-ever Canadian film to enter in competition at Cannes, is a Man of Aran of sorts which exposes its inner secret mechanisms in broad daylight. Where Flaherty chose to abscond, Perrault and Brault underline the phantasmagorical nature of the experience, its artificial provocation. Things are as clear as they can get: a film crew proposes a couple of locals to revive the practice of porpoise fishing, a tradition which had already been abandoned for a couple of decades in the region, at least for the duration of a film. Just as in Man of Aran, this is about the renewed possibility to capture a mythical maritime beast – but instead of those fabulous sequences that feature a storm, the unleashed sea acting as a danger to the locals’ scruffy vessels, here we get some scrawny grandpas, sitting in a lukewarm body of water that barely reaches their ankles, in an adventure that recalls anything but some legendary iteration of Moby Dick. If I seem headstrong in my evocations of Flaherty, it is not out of a wish to condemn his lesser practices – but because I am under the impression that both initiatives are undercut by the same communitarian gusto. In a way, thanks to these two films, two distinctive communities rediscover what it means to be together.

In other words: why would one accept to sell an image of themselves which they know is false from the very get-go? It’s due to a reason which is to be found, in a much more reflexive tone, in Pour la suite du monde. Meaning, because you wish to leave a trace to future generations – to preserve a ritual for eternity, be it even one that is already extinct, but which was once part of the fiber of a community, and which cinema alone is capable of further conserving. In the case of both Flaherty and Perrault, cinema is meant as a safe-keeper of memory; in its absence, it would disappear on its own. If Pour la suite du monde is a masterpiece to this very day, that is due to its capacity, thanks to an eminently modern medium, and that is, cinema, to orchestrate various reveries (or rather slips) which remind us of what a community also is: it’s the moment when young and old people alike unite for the same cause, in the hopes that it will not only bring the revival of a tradition, but also a feeling of solidarity which the past ceaselessly amplifies.

One must see the relationship between Alexis Tremblay, an old man that once upon a time used to participate in actual porpoise hunts, and his son Léopold, the current founder of neo-fishing. A scene in which the two fight in an iron workshop over the deep history of this practice is an especially must-see: was this habit already inscribed into the lifestyle of the “savages”, or was it founded after the arrival of French colonists in the region? The solution is not at all simple. Alexis asks for a 19th-century book to be brought to him, Histoire de l’Île-aux-Coudres, and begins to read aloud a fragment in which the author, Alexis Mailloux, recounts the story of having consulted the locals and finding out that this type of hunting was present on the island since before the French arrived. Léopold however interrupts him in a rather derisive tone: “So this is your book! Some half-told stories! […] If we would’ve had something written… but this! He came to see the locals!” It’s as if what is sufficient for Alexis – an oral tradition, with words passed from mouth-to-mouth, in a chain that is always alive -, for the modern Léopold, who needs the authority of written texts, this is all just unfounded horse feathers. Pour la suite du monde also implies the reconciliation of these two generations, who converge around an event that is capable of giving both back the wish to believe in a common ideal. As Gilles Deleuze put it, “what opposes fiction is not reality, is not the truth that is always written by masters and colonizers, but it is the fabulatory function of the poor, as long as they offer falseness the power to create a memory of it, a legend, a monster.”

Twenty years later, Perrault shoots La bête lumineuse, a film about a group of middle-aged friends who isolate themselves in a forest cabin for ten days and go elk hunting. There are many similarities between the two films, and it’s as if Perrault would have returned to the scene of the crime after forgetfulness had grown even thicker, and the disenchantment of the world had run into overdrive, to see what he could still save from it. But despite similarities, nothing explains the shock of this extraordinary film, which one enters without fathoming that it will be anything other than a complacent anecdote, and leave with our heads spinning, hallucinating at the same rhythm as the characters, and wondering if we haven’t witnessed a magic trick. How else could one explain the fact that this unassuming narrative pretense turns out to be the most privileged space to condense and amplify all of Perrault’s thematic quests? As if it were sufficient that, in the depths of a perfectly-running modern machine – can one imagine a more stereotypical type of male bonding than the macho-drunken debauchery of these mustachioed hunters? -, one would let a sliver of sand trickle in, under the shape of an individual that has the power of opening the present up for other temporalities. At that moment, everything is free to run wild.

I’m thinking of this film’s main character, Stéphane-Albert Boulais, a tall and curly-haired guy that talks a lot. Who is he, in fact? A mediocre poet that sees shimmering beasts where there’s nothing but the most trivial reality? A buffoon destined to entertain the gang of alpha males without his acts having any kind of lasting influence on the actual hunt? Or a man that is gifted with the means of deepening the world’s mysteries through words – in the case of Perrault, everything always passes through words -, and is thus the only member of the party who can understand that we are always at the intersection of various energies and contrary mythologies? There is a little bit of all that in here, no doubt about it. Here is a film, I say to myself, which constructs a character that is “more real than ourselves and yet still fantastic”, to quote Bazin, and who teaches us to watch him on his terms, without offering us any keys. From the ridiculous man that is ceaselessly mumbling, as shown to us in the beginning, we end up listening closely every time he says something, however off-the-rails it may seem at first glance.

It’s clear that, in a world in which everything is in perfect communication (to quote Serge Daney), Perrault’s documentaries speak about the rare moments in which the workings of the world get ill, and we end up being transported into a reality that has many more dimensions and is ready to pull us out of our routines. (What is a student protest like the one Perrault shoot in L’Acadie L’Acadie?!? other than such an occasion to elude time?) Porpoise fishing and elk hunting are such node points in a way that is increasingly, pressingly rational – moments in which all objective coordinates seem to fall apart. After all, as Perrault himself used to say, his films are about “people who are oratories of the present” – people who amplify its vibrations by using words, extracting a sort of orgasmic pleasure strictly from the act of verbalizing.

Earlier, I spoke of a controlled sense of drunkenness – and maybe there is no other place where it was harder to know exactly what kind of drunkenness we are dealing with, one that is caused by alcohol or one caused by the unsuspecting power of words, than in La bête lumineuse. There’s a sequence in this film that should go down as one of those formidable moments of cinema that one only comes across a few times throughout their lifetime, or even less. In this sequence, we see Albert and one of his comrades who, in contrast to the others, have decided to go hunting with arrows: both of them are aesthetes, especially Albert, the kind of man who speaks about the necessity of finding an “air aisle” for the perfect shot, and so on. Alongside them, there is also an experienced, no-nonsense hunter, who tries to lure the elk by blowing into an improvised horn. It’s a waiting scene that extends across several minutes, with the camera moving back and forth between the increasingly anxious faces of the arrow men and the outskirts of the forest, from where an increasingly clear sound of an elk seems to emerge. At one point, Albert, who up until that point had engaged in bravado on every given occasion, asks the hunter to hold his gun closer, and to shoot should the two others miss the beast, causing it to charge towards them. The wait becomes increasingly tense until it’s revealed that the sounds of the so-called elk were in fact those of two other, blind-drunk hunters, who are constantly falling over and slurring their speech. But who, at that moment, couldn’t have sworn to have felt (or even seen) the shimmering beast prowling about close by? And who could now still be eluded by the power of cinema, a way of making a gift out of something that we do not possess, in which it is sufficient to simply just believe, just as Albert believes in the elk, to discover a reality that is much more profound and destabilizing than the one in which we are moving around?

Pour la suite du monde, La bête lumineuse, as well as other films by Pierre Perrault are available on the website of Canada’s National Film Board. 

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.