We know the politician, the journalist, the great orator… But few are those who know that René Lévesque was a great cinephile, and even one of the pioneers of film criticism in Quebec.
Between 1947 and 1949, the founder of the Parti Québécois wrote nearly a hundred columns for the newspaper The Clarion of Saint-Hyacinthe. Aged 25, with his only weapons of impeccable erudition and the frank pen which will also define his political career, he compiles on his Remington Rand typewriter the scattered notes hastily scribbled at the exit of the large and small cinemas of the Sainte-Catherine Street, in Montreal.
It is to Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, professor of cinema at Laval University, that we owe the rediscovery of these 88 chronicles, now archived in the book Bright lights. Cinema chronicles 1947-1949. “Last spring, photography historian Sébastien Hudon showed me a paper on Orson Welles by René Lévesque, asking me if it was really THE René Lévesque. I knew that he had already signed a few reviews on films from here during his public activity — Ti-Coq (1953) and Orders (1974), in particular — but I did not know this one at all. I therefore undertook research, and came across this little-known page of its history. »
Although we discover above all a writer with a dazzling style, bright lights reveals or confirms, between the lines, a lot about the man in the making. His intellectual curiosity, first, manifests in an unprecedented knowledge of cinema for the time. “The first film magazines only appeared in the 1950s in Quebec. Before that, there were a few critics in the newspapers, but they were mostly theater or music columnists who condescended to talk about cinema. One wonders how he attained such technical and documentary knowledge in this cinephilic desert that was Canada at the time”, raises the professor.
His sharp gaze and immense cinephilic culture are measured against Hollywood commercialism, communist propaganda, the banality of French cinema, the hypocritical scissors of censorship, the talent and charm of John Ford, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich, the details of the staging and ideology of Jean Cocteau, Ingmar Bergman or Sacha Guitry or even the influence of the clergy on national ambition.
Commitment and cosmopolitanism
The period during which René Lévesque carried out this important critical production took place in what he calls his “inter-war period”: between the Second World War and the Korean War, when he still benefited from a some anonymity. “Historians pass quickly over these formative years, which nevertheless turn out to be quite astonishing in certain aspects. We understand, especially through his criticisms of war films like The Search (1948) or Home of the Brave (1949), how deeply moved he was by his work in the field, and how this experience of war colored his view of the world and, ultimately, his approach to politics. »
Lévesque saw the films through his own telescope, his own uniqueness. He also knew how to separate the cinematographic expression from the subject, lingering more on the style than on the subject, according to the filmmaker’s intentions.
The Clarion, a weekly published both in Saint-Hyacinthe and in the major centres, was aimed at liberals opposed to the conservatism and clericalism promoted by the Union Nationale of Maurice Duplessis. This could explain why, although he is already employed at Radio-Canada as speaker intended for Canadian soldiers based abroad, René Lévesque chose to sign his texts there. ” […] these liberal pages were to appear to this non-conformist as a formidable space of freedom where to use his independence, his rebellious pen”, writes Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan in the preface of the test.
The young columnist therefore moves with enthusiasm from the greatest classics to commercial productions, from documentaries and neorealism to the fantasy of a boulevard comedy or the artifice of a musical comedy. In some of the most gratifying passages, he does not hesitate to vilify his colleagues, and the spectators and their taste for the mediocre. “He even goes so far as to come out against the dubbing of films, on the pretext of Montreal’s bilingualism. One can almost wonder if Lévesque was really for Bill 101, ”questions the professor.
Showing an uncommon cosmopolitanism in the closed Quebec of the Great Darkness, he twirls from one country and one culture to another, defends social and racial issues, decries the lack of independent cinemas, the hegemony and vacuity of Hollywood and filming in studios — the more things change, the more they stay the same.
With his tongue-in-cheek humour, his “syncopated prosody” and his “explosive mix of popular banter and classical rigor”, René Lévesque would have much to teach today’s critics. “We have known since Diderot and Baudelaire that the best critics are first and foremost writers. Lévesque saw the films through his own telescope, his own uniqueness. He also knew how to separate the cinematographic expression from the subject, lingering more on the style than on the subject, according to the filmmaker’s intentions. In just 88 chronicles, he offers us a unique perspective on one of the most fascinating periods in the history of cinema. »