Some specificities of Quebec
The Breakneck Staircase, which links Lower Town and Upper Town, and the Château Frontenac are among the recognizable sights in Hitchcock's film. However, he was not the first to shoot a film noir there, an honour that fell to Fedor Ozep in 1947. A rare feature in the history of cinema, he shot two versions of the same film in English and French with different actors(The Fortress / The Whispering City). Scenes were shot at the nearby Montmorency Falls. Silent film legend Buster Keaton almost ended his career in Canada with The Railrodder (Gerald Potterton, 1963), in which he rode a tracker across the country at the invitation of the National Film Board of Canada. Two directors who had recently exerted a decisive influence on Quebec cinema, Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault, were part of a more global revolution: direct cinema. Cinema was presented as an unadorned, immediate experience. Brault shot a short film in Quebec City in 1964, Geneviève, devoted to the first emotions of two teenage girls who came to town for the carnival. This poetic film is named after the actress it reveals, Geneviève Bujold. The snowy Quebec City was the scene of yet another reunion between the actress and the director for Mon amie Max (1994), a painful maternal drama. Perrault's sensibility drew him more to the natural wonders of Canada: to Isle-aux-Coudres in Pour la suite du monde (which he co-directed with Brault), to a hunting trip near Maniwaki in La Bête lumineuse (1982), and to Ellesmere Island in Cornwall (1994), where two musk oxen clash. The more conventional Kid Sentiment (Jacques Godbout, 1968) tells the story of two teenagers on a summer afternoon who go chasing girls on Dufferin Terrace, typical of the era and the clash between tradition and sexual revolution.
La Belle Province deserves its nickname
In 1981, Gilles Carles adapted for the big screen a famous novel by Roger Lemelin, Les Plouffe , a lively chronicle of everyday life in Lowertown in the 1940s. Its success led to a mini-series by Denys Arcand, just before Le Déclin de l'empire américain (1986) brought him to international attention. A few films deal with Canada's rich history, such as the little-known and fascinating Black Robe / Robe noire (Bruce Beresford, 1991), which looks back at the colonization of Canada by following the journey of a Jesuit missionary commissioned by Samuel de Champlain to convert the local populations around Lake Saint-Jean - Algonquins, Hurons, Innu - at a time when Quebec was still only a settlement. A pro-independence activist, Pierre Falardeau recounts the hostage-taking by four felquists - members of the Front de libération du Québec - that led to the October Crisis in 1970 (recounted in Michel Brault's 1975 film, Les Ordres ) in his film Octobre (1994). He also recalls the uprising of French-speaking Patriotes against the English Crown in 15 février 1839 (2001).
The 1990s
In the 1990s, Quebec cinema began to adopt Hollywood recipes. The series Les Boys (Louis Saia), which began in 1997, follows the members of an amateur field hockey team and is a huge success. The production ofStop Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002) made a stop in the capital at Place Royale, at the same time as a new generation of filmmakers was emerging. Jean-Marc Vallée (who died suddenly in December 2021) and Denis Villeneuve, for the most famous, have left for Hollywood, while Xavier Dolan's productivity continues unabated, so that he will not be forgotten. Francis Leclerc's more secretive film Une jeune fille à la fenêtre (2001) stands out: in the 1920s, a young girl from the countryside moves to Quebec City to study piano. An attempt at a twilight thriller, Mémoires Affectives, shot between Quebec City and La Malbaie, shows a certain talent for imagery. Ricardo Trogi does not yet have the notoriety he deserves: his very successful autobiographical trilogy makes a few incursions(1981, 1987, 1991 released respectively in 2009, 2014, 2018) in Quebec City where he lived for a long time. He recently returned there to film a series, La Maison Bleue, which imagines an independent Quebec following the 1995 referendum.
Contemporary directors
A few films are devoted to the Aboriginal population left behind: Ce qu'il faut pour vivre (Benoît Pilon, 2008) about an old Inuit trapper whom tuberculosis leads to his dismay in a Quebec City hospital, or Maïna (Michel Poulette, 2013), an Arctic odyssey set 600 years before the arrival of Europeans. The natural beauty of the surrounding landscapes is a kind of permanent incentive to film at the same time as it provides a sense of freedom, as with the dazzling beauty of the Charlevoix region, around La Malbaie(Le Règne de la beauté, Denys Arcand, 2014). Frequently crossing the border of experimental cinema, Denis Côté creates a demanding body of work in which the wildness of nature plays an important role. Sébastien Lafleur, a formalist filmmaker, has a similar penchant for radicalism. With Tout ce que tu possèdes (2012), about a university professor who chooses to isolate himself to confront his past, and then Le Journal d'un vieil homme (2015), Bernard Émond pursues a sober, rigorous and melancholic filmography. Sébastien Pilote's films probe the greyness of the backcountry and the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region(Le Vendeur in 2011, La Disparition des lucioles in 2018). Worth seeing: Le Démantèlement (2013), a chronicle of the inner apocalypse of an aging man forced to part with his farm. Sarah préfère la course (Chloé Robichaud, 2013) is not without a typically Quebecois melancholy. Louis Bélanger adds a special kind of fantasy in Les Mauvaises herbes (2018), in which the hero improvises as a hemp farmer. Finally, we should add that Quebec has also thrown itself enthusiastically into the production of all kinds of series.
