The trouble with photographs is that you often think they represent people as they are, as they were. However, the photographs, at best, always show only fragments of life, a frozen time, determined by the sensitivity of the photographer. This is what I said to myself when I closed the very beautiful album dedicated to Pierre Falardeau which has just been published by VLB éditeur. Yes, Falardeau is there in many images. But not quite either.
The filmmaker died in 2009. At his funeral, I had my throat in my mouth. Falardeau, I liked him very much. I still love him.
Death, he knew she was watching him closely. Cancer. Removal of a kidney. Like my father. Knowing this, he had asked me, one lunch at the table, how it had gone for him. Bad, I told him. He suspected it. He didn’t expect much better.
Cancer had made him quit smoking. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it publicly. It was a matter of his private life. I still hear him roar from here at the idea that a judge from Quebec can now decree that the right to smoke must be removed from the freedom of actors when the time comes to play a character on stage!
During his lifetime, the mere mention of his name, even among certain separatists who are now draped in his fame, provoked the expression of saturated disgust. His boxing manners and rocky tongue displeased them. Falardeau loved boxing, it is true. He typed willingly, with the great talent of a pamphleteer. However, this man was less a boxer than a trainer. He trained people not to be afraid, to challenge the monopolies of speech.
At his funeral, the writer Pierre Vadeboncœur recalled a phrase from Falardeau which says a lot about him, about his relationship to the world: “We always go too far for those who are not going anywhere. “
To be honest, I still often think of him, of his desire to profoundly change society. For years, Falardeau had carried around, from one demonstration to another, with a large tricolor and republican banner flanked by a word inspired by Ho Chi Minh: “Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence. From revolutionary Vietnam to the Algeria of the FLN, he sought, in various international political experiences, correspondence with what Chevalier de Lorimier advanced in his political will of 1839. He was not eagerly interested in everyone’s life. immigrants for nothing.
At Falardeau, it was not only the Trudeauists who exasperated him by confusing the expression of a planetary solidarity with folkloric accoutrements. It would also be a mistake to want too much to crystallize the political moods of the filmmaker in the sole axis of a pro-independence project. He went further for his family. Listen to him. Read it.
The Falardeau with whom I have talked endlessly is passionate about James Baldwin. How many times have we come together to talk about him, like Senghor, Césaire, Perrault, Miron, that is to say, in short, of a universal experience of the life of the humble and the damned of Earth ? It was he who made me discover the Corsair writings de Pasolini, rightly insisting that I read them. He laughed at all those conservatives who retained only the misuse of George Orwell for their own purposes. 1984, history of better imposing their own newspeak. From Orwell, he prized above all Tribute to Catalonia and In trouble in Paris and London.
De Sartre, he liked the untimely preface by Frantz Fanon. However, he preferred to Sartre the tortured humanism of an Albert Camus, to which he returned all the time. It kind of draws the line of his horizon, I think. He also read San Antonio, for the language, but that’s another story!
At a time when so many good people aspire to buy an electric car in order to boast of looking good in society, it should be remembered to what extent the orgies of consumption, even those placed under the halos of virtue, lifted him the heart ? He willingly walked around in devalued automobiles, as if to thumb his nose at injunctions to consume new ones. It was he who taught me to recover wood found here and there to heat me in winter. His wood, he chopped by hand, with the godendard. I helped him load some, in Montreal, in front of passers-by, dumbfounded to see him recovering logs abandoned at the time of industrial society.
The album dedicated to him by his partner and his eldest son deals with several aspects of his life. He does not dwell on his report on television. Falardeau was, however, a subscriber to the small screen. From Julie Snyder to Bernard Pivot, via Denis Lévesque, he covered wide. He didn’t go on these sets pretending to have new ideas to make the present sparkle. In truth, he kept driving the same nail, in a well-assured conscience of the world. This relationship with television, often food, certainly confined him to a role. He knew it. But he never took himself for what people said about him. Look on the screen at his fingers clenched on a Lucky Strike cigarette and his brass lighter: they pretty much conveyed the discomfort he felt in taking part in this spectacle society. He was not fooled.
Fascinated by Goya’s monsters, Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Bach’s cantatas and popular music as seen as Theodorakis, he especially had a great appetite for the lives of others. In the street, no way to walk with him without being stopped by everyone. So he questioned them, questioned them with rare curiosity, quickly returned the center of interest to them. The history of all came to dance in him with the memory of each one. And so, I believe, he is still alive to us.