It all starts at the end. That is to say that the 1974 documentary on the famous Quebec multidisciplinary group L’Infonie opens with a capital and fatal telephone conversation between the two pillars of the sassy creative adventure, the poet and singer Raôul Duguay and the musician and composer Walter Boudreau. The pivotal exchange will lead to the dissolution of the collective created in 1967.
Hence the title of the NFB film, which captured this monumental moment, The Unfinished Infoniapresented Monday evening at the Cinémathèque québécoise, in Montreal, in a version restored by the Quebecor program Elephant: memory of Quebec cinema.
In this first scene, therefore, the man of words is in his large white house in the middle of a plain in Saint-Armand, in the Eastern Townships. The hyperhaired thirty-year-old smokes, seen from the back, seated in the center of a desk in the shape of an O (from Ô, as Raôul Duguay would say), surrounded by heterogeneous objects marking just as much the bygone era: a typewriter, an ashtray, a terrestrial globe, a roller phone. He grabs the handset and asks the operator for a number in Sorel, that of the man in the notes, captured head-on, a hundred kilometers away, by another camera.
“This fortuitous event happened in the middle of filming,” explains documentary filmmaker Roger Frappier, who later became a major producer (The decline of the empire American, The Power of the Dog…). Raoul told me he was going to call Walter to tell him the end of the road to L’Infonie. So I shot in Saint-Armand and another team shot on the line. We were able to reconstruct the exchange two days later, in the laboratory, when we listened to both ends of the conversation. »
All Styles
The excerpts serving as a binder are inserted between recordings of shows to take the measure of the reboudinant creative grouping of disciplines (poetry, improvisation, dance, painting, crafts, mime and even welding), multiplying musical influences (baroque, classical, electronic, jazz or pop). The shadow of the Californian counterculture is felt everywhere, as in the revue Stranglehold concentrating so much on the funny hippie era, peace lovehairs and djellabas.
Infonia also developed its own obsessions, including the letter Ô as in Raôul, therefore, the joual, the yin-yang, the inversion of proper names, Catholic religious references, and above all the number 3 and its multiples: “It there are how many cases in the case says a famous pastiche of the small catechism on the Holy Trinity. There are three deals in the deal: the deal, the deal, and the deal. The band’s 1972 double album of up to 33 members was titled Flight. 333. Raôul Duguay recounted the life and end of this cultural hurricane in Infonia, the end of everything (Trois-Pistoles), developed obviously on 333 pages and including 33 illustrations.
Walter Boudreau and Mr. Frappier met as teenagers, at the turn of the 1960s, at Sacré-Coeur College in Sorel, which has now disappeared. The musician he was already (on the saxophone) followed the scientific course while playing in the yéyé group Les Majestics, while the future filmmaker organized a film club on Friday evening.
“It quickly clicked with Raôul because he was doing happenings, explains Mr. Boudreau. We were one gang crazy, young, full of testosterones, marked by Expo 67, a huge trip of LSD experienced by Quebec, nirvana for six months. We were also the pure product of the Quiet Revolution. That’s why we put on chasubles to make fun of the brothers and sisters with whom we had studied. Our idea was to have fun with seriousness behind. There was nothing to our test. We played at Place des Arts, at the National Arts Centre. And we didn’t have one style, we had them all. »
sound lessons
The avant-garde sound recording and reproduction technique used by filmmaker Roger Frappier also distinguishes this fifty-year-old production. “I wanted a stereophonic recording,” he says. As we didn’t have a six-track recorder, with sound engineers Jean Rival and André Dussault, we used six Nagra devices. Five recorders picked up the sound, one on Raôul’s voice, one on Walter’s saxophone, one on drums, etc. The sixth Nagra synchronized everything. We mixed the film at night in a studio so that the sound marries the image. »
The final 70mm copy with six soundtracks was made by a studio in Los Angeles, the only one of its kind at the time. The Imperial cinema was the only theater in Montreal equipped with a projector capable of reproducing stereophony. This is where the one and only screening of The Unfinished Infonia in the desirable standards, other rooms having then received 35 mm versions with mono optical track.
“It was for me, I wouldn’t say a scandal, but in any case an excruciating pain to listen to this sound when we had done such stereophonic work,” says Mr. Frappier.
The restoration now makes it possible to rediscover this rich sound universe. The digitization of images and sound was once again carried out in Los Angeles from the only available copy, another treasure protected by legal deposit at the Cinémathèque. “We now have the product in its greatest beauty and in its inspiration,” says the director. This film reminds us that making documentaries was then the fiber of Quebec cinema. It was not complicated at that time: you just needed an idea, a camera and the desire to leave. »
Herr Stockhausen
The team even went to Dortmund in 1972, where a congress of contemporary music was taking place. Walter Boudreau, a graduate of the University of Montreal and McGill, future director of the Contemporary Music Society of Quebec (SMCQ), was to go there to follow advanced training given by Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The famous German composer appears in the film while the sassy Duguay explains to him a charter of sounds of his own. He ends up making him laugh with his impossible-to-reproduce mouth noises.
The participation in the filming of the poets Gaston Miron and Michèle Lalonde adds even more interest. The two poets take part in an evening with Raôul Duguay. The author of The raped man indulges in the folk song. The relationship to tradition and creation is discussed at length.
Contemporaries reveal themselves anchored in the past, critical but respectful heirs to a tradition, as the infonic music clearly shows, drawing from a multi-centennial repertoire. Politico-cultural nostalgia can turn out to be a disaster, contrary to the will to remember certain inherited lessons. Gaston Miron quotes the pre-Socratics and says that “freedom induces relationships with the past” and that “the moderns are transhistorical”.
Informed creation continues for Walter Boudreau. He will not attend the screening on Monday evening. On the other hand, he will return to the stage at the Pierre-Mercure room, just opposite the Cinémathèque, on February 26 at 3:33 a.m. precisely, directing his work Golgotha (1990) for 33 performers.
“With L’Infonie we built a sandcastle by the sea, a castle that the waves quietly swept away,” he says. It lasted as long as it lasted. I have no nostalgia for that time. My life is fulfilled. I led the SMCQ for 33 seasons. Now I have nostalgia for what I’m going to compose. I have nostalgia for the future. »