Quebec's direct cinema and the handheld revolution
Every January, once the snow has settled in for the season, I watch Les Raquetteurs again. It is a short film from 1958, made at the National Film Board by Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx, about a snowshoe convention in Sherbrooke, and on paper it ought to be a curiosity: parades, races, speeches, a great deal of civic pride in wool. On screen it is something else. The camera is in the crowd, at shoulder height and sometimes lower, jostled, close enough to the racers that you can almost feel the cold coming off them.
That closeness was the point. Brault held the camera with a wide-angle lens and walked into the event instead of filming it from a tripod at the edge. Next to the Board's polished, narrated shorts of the period it must have looked rough. Within a few years the approach had a name in Quebec, cinéma direct, and it had changed how documentary was made in French Canada and a long way beyond.
The French unit finds its feet
Some context helps. The Film Board moved its headquarters from Ottawa to Montreal in 1956, and French-language filmmakers who had long worked inside English-led structures found themselves at the centre of a city on the edge of large change. A group of young directors and camera operators, Brault, Groulx, Claude Jutra and Marcel Carrière among them, wanted to film Quebec as it actually sounded and moved. They were tired of the explanatory voice-over that told audiences what every image meant.
The equipment was changing at the same moment. Lighter 16mm cameras could be carried on the shoulder for long takes. Portable tape recorders, the Swiss-made Nagra above all, could record clean sound well away from a studio, and over the next few years engineers at the Board and elsewhere worked out how to keep picture and sound in sync without a cable or a truck. Put a light camera beside a sync recorder and a crew of two could follow a conversation wherever it went.
That pairing matters more than any one film. Before it, documentary sound was mostly built afterwards: narration, music, effects, the odd interview recorded under controlled conditions. After it, ordinary speech could carry a picture. In Quebec, during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, that had a particular charge. The way people spoke French in a kitchen or on a wharf became material for cinema, not something to be smoothed away.
Île aux Coudres
The clearest example is Pour la suite du monde (1963), directed by Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault, with Marcel Carrière on sound. Its setting is Île aux Coudres, an island in the St. Lawrence off the Charlevoix shore. Its subject is the beluga, which the islanders call the marsouin, and the trap their families once used to catch it: a weir of saplings planted in the river bottom at low tide. The practice had been abandoned for decades. The filmmakers encouraged the community to revive it, then filmed what followed: the planning, the arguments, the work on the flats, the waiting.
So this is not observational cinema in the American sense. It sets an event in motion and then watches it with great patience. Perrault cared about the islanders' speech the way a folklorist cares about a song, for its old words and its rhythm and its jokes, and Brault's camera stays with people while they talk, at about the distance of someone sharing the table. I think it is one of the great Canadian films of any kind, and the best way in for anyone new to the movement.
Perrault went back to the island for two more features, beginning with Le Règne du jour (1967). They are worth the time. The first film is still the one that lodges in the memory.
Paris, summer 1960
Brault's walking camera did not stay home. Jean Rouch, the French ethnographic filmmaker, had seen what Brault could do and brought him to Paris for Chronique d'un été, which Rouch made with the sociologist Edgar Morin in the summer of 1960 and released in 1961. The film asks Parisians whether they are happy, follows some of them into their work and private lives, and then, unusually, shows them the footage and films their reactions.
The label that stuck to it, cinéma vérité, nods to Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda, and the French version of the method accepted something the American school would soon play down: the camera changes what happens in front of it. Rouch and Morin appear on screen, prompting, asking, arguing. Brault's contribution was partly technical (the moving camera, the wide lens held close) and partly temperament. Stay near, keep moving, let people finish.
Meanwhile, down the hall
In the late 1950s, in the same building, the English-language Unit B was making the Candid Eye series for CBC television. Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroitor and Terence Macartney-Filgate, working under the producer Tom Daly, wanted everyday life caught as it happened, without staging. The Days Before Christmas (1958) follows a city through the holiday rush. The Back-Breaking Leaf (1959) goes into the tobacco fields of southern Ontario at harvest, where seasonal workers spend the day bent over the rows. Lonely Boy (1962), Koenig and Kroitor's portrait of the young Paul Anka, came a little later and took the method into pop celebrity.
The two units are often told as rival stories, and there was rivalry. But they worked in the same place, with much the same equipment, at the same moment. The English films lean toward wry observation and a certain reserve. The French films lean toward community, language and a sense that something collective was at stake. I doubt either tradition would have grown the way it did without the other one down the hall.
The American parallel
South of the border, Robert Drew's group at Drew Associates was chasing the same freedom. Primary (1960) follows John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey through the Wisconsin Democratic primary, with Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles among those behind the cameras. Terence Macartney-Filgate, fresh from the Candid Eye, shot part of it too, which tells you how small this circle was.
The Americans called their approach direct cinema, and their rules were stricter than anyone's in Montreal or Paris: no interviews, as little narration as possible, no staging, filmmakers out of the frame. The ideal was the fly on the wall. Critics have argued ever since about whether that invisibility was ever real, and the argument is a useful one to carry into any observational film.
Three ways of being in the room
These are tendencies rather than laws, and plenty of films cross the lines. Still, setting the three side by side clears up a confusion that persists in reviews, where "vérité" gets used for anything shot handheld.
| American direct cinema | French cinéma vérité | Quebec cinéma direct | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early landmark | Primary (1960) | Chronique d'un été (1961) | Les Raquetteurs (1958) |
| Where the camera stands | Back, waiting for events | Inside the conversation, often prompting it | Inside the crowd, close, part of the occasion |
| Filmmakers on screen | Almost never | Often, by design | Rarely; their influence shows in what happens |
| Interviews | Avoided | Central | Conversation more than formal interview |
| Typical subject | Public figures under pressure | Ordinary people questioned about their lives | Communities, work, language, ritual |
| Sound | Sync, with little narration | Sync, driven by talk | Sync, with close attention to local speech |
What came after
Cinéma direct did not stay in documentary. Groulx's Le Chat dans le sac (1964) carried its loose, conversational style into a fiction feature about a young Montrealer working out his politics. Brault shot Claude Jutra's Mon oncle Antoine (1971), and that film's winter light and patient framing owe plenty to the documentary years. His own Les Ordres (1974), a fiction about ordinary people detained during the October Crisis of 1970, uses documentary methods so that its composite characters feel like witnesses.
The deeper inheritance is in daily practice. The two-person crew, the camera on the shoulder, the willingness to wait, the habit of letting people talk in their own words and their own accent: all of it is so normal now that it is easy to forget it had to be invented, and that a good share of the inventing happened in Montreal. The same instinct, that the people on screen should shape the film, ran on into the Board's Challenge for Change program and its work with communities. You can still trace the line on the festival circuit, and Dev Raghunathan's field guide to Canada's documentary festivals is a good map of where to look.
A viewing order
- Les Raquetteurs (1958). Short and joyful, and the moment the camera walks into the crowd.
- The Back-Breaking Leaf (1959). The English unit's take on the same impulse, cooler and more ironic.
- Primary (1960). For the American rules, and for the moments where they strain.
- Chronique d'un été (1961). Watch for the walking shots and for the closing screening.
- Pour la suite du monde (1963). Give it an evening with the phone in another room. It was made with patience and asks for some back.
Several of the NFB titles here stream free at nfb.ca, though a big screen helps, and if a rep cinema or film society near you runs a Quebec series, go. Then, on the next snowy afternoon, take a camera outside, hold it low, walk toward something that is moving, and see how hard it is to get as close as Brault did in 1958.
