Cinéma québécois: de I'artisanat à I'industrie by Gilles Marsolais (review)

be victims of and/or perpetuators of stereotypical and/or negative, hegemonic ways of thinking. With a cameo by Arthur’s favorite political figure, Lionel Jospin, and scenes such as the one in which Baya dramatically cries when, during the second round of the 2002 elections, she finds herself forced to vote for Chirac (over Le Pen), this film could be appropriate for a French culture or politics syllabus as it would undoubtedly generate interesting comparative discussions with the American political system. Similarly, the first fifteen minutes of the film are devoted to flashbacks motivated by Arthur’s and Baya’s reflections on their respective upbringing and parents’ origins. These flashbacks consist of scenes of World War II Nazi Occupation and its aftermath as well as of the French-Algerian War and events that lead Baya’s father to take refuge in France. Although nudity is present in the film, making it possibly a questionable addition to a high school French course, it must be noted that during Baya and Arthur’s love-making scene, Arthur dresses—not undresses—Baya. This twist on traditional filmic depiction of sexual acts is motivated by the previous scene in which—comically in keeping with her free-spirited personality—Baya absentmindedly leaves her apartment completely naked, only to be “saved” by Arthur who covers her with his conservative suit jacket as she exits the metro. Thus demonstrating that, at times, Arthur’s conventional nature is actually quite charming and useful to even the extremely liberal-thinking Baya. The title, Le nom des gens (peculiarly translated as The Names of Love), gains in significance throughout the film as the word “name” becomes increasingly synonymous with “label.” From Arthur’s comments about sharing his name with a pressure cooker and Baya explaining that most people mistakenly assume her name is Brazilian to the wish of Arthur’s mother to abandon her Jewish-sounding surname, the film’s characters repeatedly reflect on the often-false currency of proper names as well as that of political monikers. In fact, the French title does what the English translation cannot: provide a distance between people (gens) and the names (le nom) with which we associate them. Boise State University (ID) Mariah Devereux Herbeck MARSOLAIS, GILLES. Cinéma québécois: de l’artisanat à l’industrie. Montréal: Triptyque, 2011. ISBN 978-2-89031-727-7. Pp. 317. $30 Can. Marsolais has published several noteworthy books, including L’aventure du cinéma direct revisitée (1997), and hundreds of articles, many in the Quebec film journal 24 images. This volume is a collection of his articles, spanning four decades and a gamut of films from classics of Quebec cinema, including documentaries , to more recent features and even short subjects. The collection is preceded by what Marsolais calls a “Mise en situation,” that attempts to trace the main tendencies of Quebec’s film history, with a particular focus on the National Film Board and the documentary tradition. The last section of this introductory material presents some basic socio-political information, along with a biting analysis of multiculturalism and pluralism in the Quebec context, revelatory of the author’s “point of view” (a phrase he uses to designate the unifying theme of this collection), and reflective of the fact that this particular excerpt was written the same year as the second failed referendum on Quebec sovereignty. Reviews 171 The remainder of this volume is organized mainly by director, some of whom are familiar names, such as Michel Brault, Claude Jutra, Denys Arcand, and Pierre Falardeau, while others will be relatively unknown to all but a few specialists, either because they work mostly in documentary, like Arthur Lamothe and Serge Giguère, or because their best films are from an earlier time, such as Jacques Leduc’s On est loin du soleil (1970), or, lastly, because they are not considered canonical, making their work hard to find or even forgotten, and here we can cite Claude Gagnon’s The Pianist and Claude Fortin’s Le voleur de caméra, both from the early 1990s, which are the subjects of two of Marsolais’s critiques. The organization of the articles by directors, however, does not...