Pierre Jutras has devoted his entire life to promoting local cinema, first as a programmer and curator at the Cinémathèque québécoise, then as a founding member and administrator of Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma, among others. He died last Thursday of cancer at the age of 78. Since then, his friends have paid him warm tributes.
“Several generations of moviegoers owe him a lot,” wrote Marcel Jean, director of the Cinémathèque since 2015, in a text published on the latter’s website on Friday. In interview with The dutyhe maintains that he was “a pillar of the Cinémathèque, from the 1970s until the end of the 1990s”.
Dominique Dugas, general manager of Elephant: memory of Quebec cinema, who knew him when he was a receptionist at the Cinémathèque, is one of those moviegoers who are indebted to him: “Pierre felt my love for the cinema of Quebec and accompanied me in my first steps in programming. He shared his passion for all kinds of directors who had strong signatures. »
Robert Daudelin, who was director of the Cinémathèque from 1971 to 2002 and who hired Pierre Jutras in 1978 after his film studies in Belgium, also paid tribute to him on the website of the cinema review 24 Pictures. In an interview, he remembers his “impeccable eye”, his ability to “recognize the best filmmakers from the first shots of a film”.
He shared his passion for all kinds of directors
From John Ford to Denis Côté
“Pierre never ceased to introduce the new authors of current cinema (Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, Wang Bing and Hong Sang-soo), while continuing to share his contagious admiration for Epstein or Eisenstein”, wrote Robert Daudelin .
Dominique Dugas adds that he “reached wide in his cinephilia, passionate as much by John Ford as by Denis Côté”. Marcel Jean recalls his “retrospective of short films by Denis Côté” in the early 2000s, as well as the “remarkable” issue he edited in the magazine Copy Zero on Anne-Claire Poirier. “Pierre made sure that he was granted a status comparable to Michel Brault today”, which was inconceivable for a woman at the time, specifies Mr. Jean.
In addition to having been co-founder and co-director of Copy Zerothen The Cinematheque Review, Pierre Jutras tried his hand at directing. His short films Lament for a man of letters (1988) and Little cannibal chronicles 1. Rosalie (1996) were “of high quality,” says Daudelin.
However, the latter remembers him above all as an invaluable “smuggler”, borrowing the expression from film professor André Habib. Marcel Jean agrees: “Pierre Jutras sacrificed his career as a director for this role of facilitator and he devoted himself to it as if it were a vocation. »