40 years ago, Frédéric Back won the Oscar for best animated short film for his film Crack. Despite this first international success, it is above all his second, The man who planted trees which comes to mind when we talk about the talented designer from France, but whose work is authentically Quebec.
It is true that the themes of The man who planted trees for which he won the same Oscar in 1988, are immediately universal. Perseverance, hard work, patience and the environment easily affect all cultures, which perhaps explains its immense success and the vivid memory we keep of it.
For its part, crack is rooted in Quebec history. In this film, we follow a rocking chair in a premodern Quebec, where tradition, family and art weave the bonds of a society. This chair crosses the ages to a modern Quebec, where the loneliness and coldness of contemporary art divide more than they unite.
Certainly, the decor is Quebec, but we would be mistaken in thinking that this work is not universal for all that. It evokes in fact that it is at the forefront of the particular that we find the universal.
With this film, Back is a black sheep in the artistic world. In this break between traditional Quebec and modern Quebec, he sees the idea of loss. Without showing that “it was better before”, Back illustrates with finesse and lucidity what Quebec has lost on its way to modernity.
Indeed, since Global denial (1948), many artists saw in the rejection of tradition and the past a new path to creativity. Perhaps this was indeed the case at the time, when the Church and tradition stifled the creative impulse of these young artists. But was that still the case in the late 1980s?
crack has the merit of reminding his time, and perhaps ours as well, that tradition is an inexhaustible and essential material on which we can rely to create. He also recalls that Quebec, which wanted to believe itself modern at the turn of the Quiet Revolution, would benefit from repairing this break to celebrate its history and think of itself in its historical continuity.
The last seconds of the short film show that the history of Quebec, in its tradition and in its modernity, is a celebration. Celebrating modern Quebec? Nothing’s easier. The traditional one? Still need to have a memory. What this beautiful short film therefore reminds us of, in 2022, is that the transmission must be started again generation after generation.