Struck down by a heart attack last week before being hospitalized, director Claude Fournier died Thursday at the age of 91. Man of cinema who participated in the adventure of direct cinema, it is to him that we owe the cult film two golden women. His career will also have led him to shoot for television, such as Second-hand happinessaccording to Gabrielle Roy, and to become a biographer, he who wrote, among other things, Rene Levesque. Portrait of a lonely man. With his spouse, Marie-José Raymond, he co-founded Éléphant — the memory of Quebec cinema, dedicated to the restoration and digitization of Quebec’s cinematographic heritage.
On Facebook, critic and author Michel Coulombe pointed out that Claude Fournier “was one of the founding figures of Quebec cinema”.
On Twitter, Prime Minister François Legault for his part wrote that “Claude Fournier leaves a great legacy to Quebec cinema”.
Claude Fournier was born in Waterloo on July 23, 1931, with his twin brother, Guy. They are the eldest of a family of six children. “It’s going to be strange living without him…because he was more than a brother. We did all our studies together, we did cinema together, we did television together, we always did everything together or almost,” Guy Fournier told The Canadian Press.
In his autobiography, By dint of living (Libre expression, 2009), a fascinating work with a romantic breath that colleague Denys Arcand described in The duty of “intimate and authentic fresco”, Claude Fournier evokes with modesty but a bottom of bitterness the religious education and the boarding school.
After his classical course, he became a journalist for the Sherbrooke daily The gallery, in the late 1940s, before being hired by Radio-Canada in 1952. In Montreal, again as evidenced by his autobiography, his daily life populated by stars gave his life the appearance of a film. From 1955 to 1961, he wrote for the youth program Bim and Sol, contributing to the passage to the creation of the character immortalized by Marc Favreau. At the same time, he published two collections of poetry.
In 1957, he joined the National Film Board (ONF) in the advertising department, but aspired to directing, which would happen in 1959 when he made the documentary Télesphore Légaré, fishing wardenand, in 1960, Alfred Desrochers, poet.
In 1961, with friend Gilles Carle, he co-directed in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon France on a pebble, a key work of direct cinema. He soon became part of the collective that created The fighta short documentary film shot on the fly considered one of the centerpieces of French-language production by the NFB at that time.
He left to live in New York for two years, then returned home. After collaborating with Anne-Claire Poirier, he founded Les films Claude Fournier with his brothers Daniel and Guy. The trio produced close to a hundred documentaries for Radio-Canada. On July 24, 1967, Claude Fournier holds the camera when General de Gaulle launches his famous “Vive le Québec!” Long live the free quebec ! “. He is the only director to capture the moment, and his images go around the world.
A naughty success
The 1970s started with a lion, or rather lionesses, with the release of two golden women. Monique Mercure and Louise Turcot play two women who, tired of being neglected by their husbands, multiply sexual escapades, emancipating themselves at the same time. The critics are dismayed, but the spectators – there are two million – want more. The result is one of the biggest successes of Quebec cinema. Note that the filmmaker wrote the screenplay with his partner Marie-José Raymond, with whom he immediately founded the company Rose Films (The apple, the tail and the pips ; I’m far from you cute ; etc.).
In 1983, Claude Fournier offered a careful adaptation of Second-hand happiness, based on the seminal novel by Gabrielle Roy: a film version and a television version are produced in the form of a miniseries. We discover a very young Mireille Deyglun in the role of Florentine Lacasse, a modest waitress in the Saint-Henri district, loved and then abandoned. Once again, Marie-José Raymond is co-writing.
For the small screen, the couple, together with Michel Cournot, proposed in 1988 the ambitious historical saga The weavers of power, devoted to the American exodus of French Canadians who, in the 1920s, believed they had found a better future south of the border. During the exit, Claude Fournier is astonished in The duty “It is incredible that the migration of a fifth of the population of Quebec in barely 15 years has never been taken up by a filmmaker or a writer. Apart from a few university theses, there is almost nothing on the subject. Perhaps because it concerns too many miserable people who have been completely assimilated in less than four generations into the American melting pot, without ever the shadow of a rebellion. »
The series won the Gémeaux prizes for best director (Fournier) and best text. Claude Fournier published the story in a novel the same year (Éditions Québec Amérique).
In 1997, as two golden women in its day, comedy I’m in !, where Roy Dupuis passes himself off as gay in order to succeed in his professional life, is lopsided by the critics, but rallies the public. In 1999, it is a return to TV with the series Juliette Pomerleautaken from the best-selling novel by Yves Beauchemin.
To the rescue of our cinema
Impossible to ignore the 2005 series Felix Leclerc. Scratched from all sides, the production was criticized by Mario Clément, then director of programming for Radio-Canada, the broadcaster. A defamation lawsuit ensued, which ended in 2008 with an order for the state corporation to pay $200,000 to Claude Fournier and Marie-José Raymond.
In 2009, the couple founded the company Éléphant — memory of Quebec cinema with the aim of safeguarding and digitizing the national cinematographic heritage. It was following a discussion with Pierre Karl Péladeau, who funded this vast project on a philanthropic basis, that Elephant was born. Sharing responsibility for general management until 2018, Claude Fournier and Marie-José Raymond will oversee the restoration of 225 titles.
On a more personal note, I had the pleasure of meeting Claude Fournier a few times in recent years, having often written about the Elephant project: he is a perpetually affable and energetic man. Moreover, in the weeks preceding his death, he was heavily involved against the war in Ukraine, demonstrating almost daily in front of the Russian consulate. For a bit, one would have believed him to be eternal, although he probably never had any illusions. In fact, one thinks of his autobiography, which opens thus: “The joys of childhood could have lasted all my life. But suddenly things took a turn. And I started to age, too. »