Life after Île Ste-Croix (review)

Life after Île Ste-Croix, produced by Ronald Rudin and directed by Leo Aristimuño, is not really new to most readers of this journal. The DVD release is dated 2006, but the film itself has been screened at a number of academic conferences and other special events over the past few years. It recounts the story of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the first French effort to establish a permanent settlement in North America. In the summer of 2004, Acadians, members of the Passamaquoddy First Nation, and English-speaking residents of New Brunswick and Maine came together to remember what happened on a tiny island in the Ste-Croix River, now the boundary between New Brunswick and Maine, during the winter of 1604–5.

Each group involved in the commemoration had its own reasons for remembering this early seventeenth-century colony, and the film tells the story of what they hoped to gain from the celebration, how they understood its historical significance, and how they managed to work together to pull off an international celebration in a small Atlantic community. Thus, Life after Île Ste-Croix tells the story of commemorating the ‘birth of Acadia,’ but reveals that this commemoration was about so much more. Champlain’s arrival at Ste-Croix in 1604, one participant stresses, is a founding Canadian – not ‘just’ Acadian –moment. Others draw connections to regional, international, American, and Aboriginal contexts and memories. But the film puts its own stress on the efforts of the Passamaquoddy nation in its struggle to win official recognition from the Government of Canada.

For the most part, the film allows the participants to speak for themselves. There is no narrative voice-over, and only the structural division of the film into five subtitled sections instructs the audience in what to interpret. As a result, the presentation of information is left in the words of the participants in the festival; the film does not intrude overly on their messages, even if in places this may have been desirable. Even the expert analysis is left to participants in the film, scholars who play the role of organic intellectuals, participant observers of their own communities. This was clearly a conscious decision intended to teach lessons about the construction and expression of collective memories. However, as a film-making technique, it reduces the presentation to a sequence of fairly static shots of segments of interviews, speeches, and glimpses of musical performances. Undergraduate students might be forgiven for concluding that expressions of collective memory and commemorative events are fairly dull.

When I first saw the film I thought it would have made an excellent radio documentary, but with the dvd release it has become even further out of step with its medium. Simply put, the dvd’s greatest drawback is that it fails to take advantage of the dvd technology. The film does not advance by chapter and title, meaning the dvd is little more than a digital version of a vcr recording. The storage capacity of the dvd format would have allowed maps, images, documents, and other teaching tools to be included. It also could have permitted students and teachers to pursue some topics in greater depth, all on the same disk. Part 2, ‘Who Remembers and Why,’ serves as an illustration of the potential. In this section of the film, multiple lines of memory can be seen to intersect and interact in this one commemorative event. These lines might have been separated out or explored in more depth in a mini-feature, or by supplying additional footage and background context. Leaving the dvd as simply the original film makes for a clumsy teaching tool. This is a great shame because, although the film itself is not visually arresting or dynamic, its presentation of the motivations, competitions, and jostlings of different players putting together a fairly obscure commemorative celebration offers a fascinating window onto the processes of making public memory.