Beyond its pan-Canadian mission, the National Film Board (NFB) remains embedded in Quebec’s DNA. With cannon shots, he came to propel our pioneers of the seventh art, his images fed the imagination, even of spectators who do not go back to his sources. Review on the NFB platform snowshoers by Gilles Groulx or the moving The happy life of Leopold Z by Gilles Carle helps to measure the time that passes through a society.
My uncle Anthony by Claude Jutra and For the rest of the world of Pierre Perrault and Jacques Brault will have been, under this sign, our collective ocean liners. In animation, the presence of an English-speaking master like Norman McLaren, wildly inventive, recognized and awarded everywhere, as well as that of Co Hoedeman, Jacques Drouin and others have made the metropolis a hub that never rusts. If animation and documentaries remain flagships of the NFB, it is because young filmmakers have climbed onto raised pedestals.
So many stories weave its way after the move of its head office from Ottawa to Montreal in 1956. Unfettered freedom, the birth of direct cinema, all-out experimentation rhyme with its three letters. Some pioneers still evoke the resourceful method of creators, diverting budgets from documentaries to fiction, stealing reels of film, just to help each other on their reciprocal works, like in the countryside at the time of chores. Trained there, Denys Arcand, Gilles Carle and other colorful birds would continue their private careers. Mythical soil. From 1965 to 1975 especially.
Later, venturing up to the big building on Côte-de-Liesse, long the seat of the Office, we experienced feelings of vertigo. The sets of fiction films no longer rolled. The permanent filmmakers gave way to contract workers, after massive budget cuts. Grinding of teeth, departures, internal crises; the golden age was getting a bit old.
In 2012, a spontaneous movement for the survival of the NFB had formed, worried about the cultural bloodletting of the Conservative government. It was hot, it was pitching over there. Moreover, more and more new technologies were changing the game. Parity and diversity imposed themselves as new paradigms. Impoverished, the NFB, still a little in deficit, changing, but still standing! Its production-dissemination combo remains unique in the world. This year, the NFB, which has other tentacles across the country, receives its 77e Oscar nomination for animated short The flying sailor by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby.
On Wednesday, I went on a guided tour of the gleaming premises occupied by the Office in the Balmoral block, rue de Bleury. In operation since 2019. However, during the pandemic, everything was working in slow motion. Some services took time to set up shop in the city centre. But here we are! On the ground floor, a few objects, including McLaren’s wooden seat from its iconic 1957 film with Claude Jutra He was a chair. In full corridors however floats the desire to make new skin. The ghosts of the past are stirring elsewhere, under the vaults of the institution in Saint-Laurent, perhaps. Or lost along the way.
With its high red triangles, the Balmoral block is the most beautiful architectural ornament of the Place des Festivals. Outside, inside. From one floor to another, we admire the premises high tech, the light, the elegance of the details and of the whole with high sharp points. Still, on the scale of the immense spaces on Côte-de-Liesse, the smallest room here seems cramped.
The Alanis O’Bomsawin theatre, a state-of-the-art projection room, the soundproof post-production or creation centers, protected from the vibrations of the metro below, are sealed bubbles from which the eye escapes through the windows.
Producer Marc Bertrand, at the French Animation Studio, welcomes us to his kingdom. He likes to feel ideas prosper and bloom in all the winds. In his eyes, animation remains an eternal terrain of discovery and exploration. His enthusiasm seems to create bridges between yesterday and tomorrow.
The famous pin screen, on which filmmaker Jacques Drouin worked for so long (Michèle Lemieux succeeds him), was a movers’ nightmare. So fragile with its 250,000 small pins to push to create shadow play patterns; school of infinite patience. The NFB, through him, suddenly seemed timeless. And I wanted the modern nest to soon become a real place of exchange with the public through its works, its mission, its roots. In their no man’s land, the old premises had cut him off from the world. In the beating heart of the city, I don’t know if it will live better, but at least it shines.