Introduction: Estates General of Third Cinema, Montreal '74

Montreal, June 2-8, 1974: some of the most important representatives of political cinema from around the world got together at the Rencontres Internationales pour un nouveau cinéma. The list of participants included: filmmakers, producers and '68 film groups from France and elsewhere; Latin American political filmmakers and representatives of a burgeoning African cinema; film critics, historians and producers; and members from film institutes and distributors from Europe and North America, including, of course, the Canadian organizers of the conference, André Pâquet and the Comité d'action cinématographique (CAC). Given the sheer number and diverse backgrounds of the participants, the Montreal conference holds a serious claim to being one of the most important worldwide events in political cinema of the period.

"New Cinema"—a term that appears in the conference's name—functioned as a broad umbrella term under which diverse trends of renovation and rupture had been spreading across the world throughout the 1960s. In Montreal, this idea solidified around the notion that cinema culture's primary goal is to promote decolonization, finding its correlate in a new kind of national cinema that aimed to "democratize the structures of film," consistent with the concept of Third Cinema developed earlier by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. Perhaps the boldest and most ambitious goal of the gathering in Montreal was to forge or strengthen ties among politically committed cinemas in the wake of the ruptures of 1968 in Europe as well as the emergence of Third Worldist filmmaking. The idea of an "Estates-General of Third Cinema" combines two references: firstly, the events of May '68, when the French film industry united in solidarity with those who had gone on strike, occupying the IDHEC (Institut des hautes études cinématographiques), and when the CNC (Centre national de la cinématographie) established the Estates General of Cinema (Les états généraux du cinéma français)—a term with its roots in the French Revolution, with its subtending notion of "cahiers de doléances" (the collected grievances of the population that animated the first meeting of the états généraux); secondly, the notion of Third Cinema—whose goals of cinema as the vehicle for national liberation and solidarity among the Third World countries were shared by several projects of the period.

This introduction aims to sketch a brief history of the Rencontres internationales pour un nouveau cinéma as part of a larger network of leftist film culture internationally, and suggest some approaches for thinking of its significance historically and theoretically in hopes of stimulating further research and creating an ongoing conversation about its legacy.

I

Planning for the Conference began in early 1973. The idea was André Pâquet's, who had been living in Europe for a few years prior where he attended many of the most important events representing new developments in cinema worldwide (the Berlinale, the Pesaro Film Festival, the Mannheim and Leipzig festivals, and the Journées cinématographiques de Carthage, among others), and was in contact with alternative film groups and distributors promoting the New Cinema movements.¹

Upon his return to Montreal in April of 1973, Pâquet began working on the creation of the Comité d'action cinématographique, which would organize the Montreal conference the following year. The list of the Committee's members included some of the important figures in Quebec cinema of the time: Guy Bergeron, René Boissay, Marc Daigle, Fernand Dansereau, Carol Faucher, Roger Frappier, Claude Godbout, Gilles Groulx, Arthur Lamothe, Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Raymond Marie Léger, as well as Sandra Gathercole from Toronto, and Werner Aellen from Vancouver.

The committee had decided to establish itself as an autonomous group and reached a joint decision on the type of film it would promote: confronted by a powerful commercial film industry, the only option was to defend the "endangered other cinema" (un autre cinéma). To achieve this, they planned to promote a sort of "International of small filmmaking countries," that is, countries where such cinema was facing particular challenges. In this regard, Pâquet considered the...