We thought we knew René Lévesque well… But suddenly, a secret drawer opens, filled with hidden treasures. From there arises the cinema columnist of the 1940s for the weekly The Clarion from Saint-Hyacinthe, directed by Télesphore-Damien Bouchard (you can’t make it up); dusty legacy since the Great Darkness. Without Laval University film professor Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan — who previously unearthed the only filmed images of Marcel Proust — these sparkling texts would have languished in oblivion. The discoverer also enamels the preface of the work with precious reflections.
These pearls signed Lévesque are finally reunited in the collection Bright lights. Cinema chronicles 1947-1949 (Boréal), in bookstores on 1er november. Of all the tributes to the great man on his centenary, the publication of this book is to be marked with a milestone.
Barely twenty-five, but what a pen! What verve! What culture! Young ? Could he really remain so after having covered as a reporter the liberation of the Dachau camp, seen walking skeletal humans and traversed the war-torn world in perfect bilingualism? His curiosity, his sense of history, his brilliant intelligence and his old sea dog’s judgment accompanied him. Exploding in his prose.
Here, the time is not for politics. “It’s in the cinema – with its washed-out azure, set on fire with garish neon lights, streaked with placards and banners where ever new advertisements scream, always the same, a sky fertile in windfalls of dollars and raw truths – that we think”, he writes with his lyricism of modernity.
A glorious writer’s path was being traced around the bend. His chronicles scream it. The Quebec adventure would have turned out differently. To him, his destiny as a dream sower. In his autobiography Wait until I remember…the broken statesman weighed his words in 1986. At the Bugle, we meet him without hindrance, rebellious, funny, lit. And his erudition, partly the result of the classical course — elitist, of course, but where public school would have done better to collect some nuggets —, goes beyond his triumphant cinephilia to sow his lights on Plato, Racine, Shakespeare, Baudelaire and other beacons of humanity.
This unrepentant reader can cite the works on which the adaptations are based, knows the cinema like the back of his hand, modulates his sentences in a chastened French, isolated in his dormant society, although standing by his side. Here we are far from the fictional creature Ti-Poil.
The seventh Quebec art stammers, specialized criticism to match, censorship cuts off or blocks access to screens to foreign works. Beneath the numbness and chilly religiosity, he bangs on his society with jubilation, destroyed with red bullets The fortress by Fedor Ozep filmed in Quebec, criticizes the public for its thirst for deja-vu, calls for the awakening of the dead.
From Hollywood, the artilleryman makes his pet peeve, while recognizing the eminence of John Ford, John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, with flats or not. Before Mr Verdoux of Chaplin, Lévesque regrets the masterpieces of yesteryear by the old master: “Farewell, then, lamentable and insolent clown, unrivaled acrobat and mime, brilliant inventor of the “eating machine” (Modern Times) and geopolitical ballet (The Great Dictator). »
This fiery critic spares neither France nor its sacred monsters. Even Cocteau suffered the taunts of the insolent youngster. But through his analyzes of the games of Louis Jouvet and Pierre Fresnay quivers the finesse of his sensitivity. As he knows how to describe the beauties of Rome, open city of Rossellini orHamlet by Laurence Olivier! As he scouts the first steps of the screenwriter Bergman in Torment by Alf Sjöberg! It includes the mechanics of editing, soundtrack, acting and staging as a seasoned commentator.
Flair, taste, style, baggage, an avant-garde spirit, contradictions in those who tip their hat to works of relaxation while savoring above all the highest dramas. The don Juan may celebrate as a connoisseur the charms of the vamps of the time, he bows to the talent of Marlene Dietrich, Lana Turner and Olivia de Havilland. One world will disappear, another will rise. And the quest for artistic quality? Canned yesterday as today.
“Why do the ugliest films drag on our screens while the good ones, as soon as they arrive, immediately disappear? » asks René Lévesque with an acuity in overview of eras. This gifted man with antennas puts his finger on so many cultural wounds that are still alive that we would like to invite his youthful gaze to illuminate our pea puree. But he would no doubt feel as lonely there as in the depths of the dark years of Duplessis.