Histoire générale du cinéma au Québec by Yves Lever (review)

HUMANITIES 255 Larouche writing on experimental film contributes to a little-known field. Gilles Marsolais's potted account of the cinema direct documentary - at nine columns second only to the twenty-one columns on the National Film Board - is readable enough, but for a historian's road as well travelled as this one, it lacks the incisive analysis that would have helped it transcend journalistic impressionism. I would have welcomed separate articles offering an analysis of feminist films, educational films, or films made for the union movement. If this dictionary is a clear advance on its predecessors, it is because ·of its comprehensiveness, its thoroughness, and the clarity of its presentation . It may lack the intense ideological focus of the HoulelJulien dictionary, written before the 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty, but its all-embracing heterogeneity, in which most things are presented sunny side up, is perhaps revealing of the social and political context for a contemporary survey of film-making in Quebec. (DAVID CLANDFIELD) Yves Lever. Histoire generaIe du cinema au Quebec Editions du Boreal. 555· $24.95 In his preface, the author signals this work as the first discursive history of cinema in Quebecby a single hand since a few tentative works celebrating the beginnings of this cinema appeared in the 1960s by the likes of Robert Daudelin, Gilles Marsolais, or Rene Predal. Hithe"rto, the field of Quebec film historiography has been peopled with anthologies of articles, collections of interviews, dictionaries, statistical surveys, and checklists. It is true that monographs have appeared on specific periods: Germain Lacasse's research on the earliest manifestations of film in Quebec, four volumes by Pierre Veronneau in Les Dossiers de la Cinematheque, Christiane Tremblay-Daviault's study of the first Quebec film industry of 1942-53, and Ginette Major's summary of the 1970s. Other monographs have featured groups of film-makers (Louise Carriere's work on women film-makers) or modes of film (Giles Marsolais's work on cinema direct). At least two series of works on individual film-makers have appeared, although only a few, such as Michel Brule's book on Pierre Perrault or Peter Harcourt's on Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, can be said to constitute genuinely scholarly monographs. Through the French-language works the emphasis has tended towards the sociological rather than the aesthetic, the thematic rather than the formal, dwelling on the political economy rather than the rhetorical conventions of production and reception. The field was ready for a historical synthesis along similar lines, and Yves Lever, who teaches film at Ahuntsic College in Montreal, was obviously the person for the job, a critic of many years' standing for 256 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 Relations, with several anthologies and reference guides to Quebec film under his belt. The book that has appeared is an extensive reworking of an earlier limited-edition manual that Lever put together from his college course notes under the title Histoire du cinema au Quebec in 1983. As the author freely states, the new book retains that textbook flavour, a historical survey designed for ease of use and consultation rather than the application of a particular critical model or the demonstration of an interpretative thesis. All the same, it is a valuable tool and completes a job that needed doing. The book begins with an introduction worth reading alone for the extraordinarily sinuous efforts of the author to respond to all imaginable methodological inquiries or potential objections. The body of the work is then broken into four grand periods: the so-called silent period from 1896 to 1938, the French-Canadian period from 1939 to 1955, the Quiet Revolution from 1956 to 1968, and the period of maturity from 1969 to 1987. A thirty-two-page conclusion completes the discursive history, yielding place to an eighty-page series of documentary appendices, lists, quotations, bibliographies, and indices. Each of the four periods discussed is dealt with under a series of headings. It is this that gives the work its textbook flavour. The headings correspond to the component parts of the film industry's economic infrastructure (Production, Distribution, and Exhibition) and its framing within a broader socio-cultural context (Legislation, the Role of the Church...