I looked at the brick or the bomb with a half-curious, half-frantic eye. So heavy, almost 600 pages. A long, unquiet river. Before freediving in The FLQ in the thisQuebec nematography, published by Somme tout. It ironically took a Frenchman like Sylvain Garel to dissect the films tackling the October 1970 crisis in our corner of the globe. Some 250 audiovisual works touched directly or indirectly on the events surrounding the violent struggles of the FLQ, the death of Minister Pierre Laporte at the hands of the Chénier cell and the collective trauma of the War Measures Act. A red and black dot on our trajectory with a before and after.
“It was the most serious crisis of Quebec modernity,” says Sylvain Garel. By consulting creators and former activists, viewing kilometers of archives, unearthing works with an obscure existence, unusual short films, alongside flagship films, the author has become knowledgeable on the subject.
French indeed, but we had long rubbed shoulders here with Sylvain Garel in the pharmacies and dens of our seventh art. With his local Quebec friend, he was part of the building. During the 1990s, I attended the Quebec Cinema Festival in Blois, in the heart of the Loire Valley. Taking a foreign look at a society, like this native Parisian, helps us grasp truths. In his long introduction, the author notes to what extent cinema entered its modernity under the sound of bombs, the “ Just watch me! » by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the deprivation of civil rights of stunned political prisoners. Creators who often sympathized with the Felquists of their age, if not by means then at least by the aspiration for collective liberation, stood up. “In Montreal, people were not used to seeing soldiers everywhere, as is the case for us in Paris. It was a huge shock. »
Prefaced by the October crisis specialist Louis Fournier, this work is a reflection by the author on the trajectory of the FLQ as much as a directory of films with notes. On a tone of tragedy, in humor, through the themes of kidnapping which multiplied in the cinema after 1970, under the cameras of Marxist-Leninist groups of the time, by committed filmmakers or stunned witnesses then by their descendants , the film remembers… the video, the podcasts relayed it. An immense legacy of images and cries, the scale of which is difficult to measure.
Other artists of the time shook Quebec, with songs like Bozo-les-culottes, by Raymond Lévesque, and The angry lark, by Félix Leclerc, or the poem SpeakWhite, by Michèle Lalonde. “Around ten poets and singers were arrested in 1970,” explains Sylvain Garel. It is enormous ! »
Fictions or documentaries on all screens, many film buffs on the FLQ side refer to the films of Michel Brault, Pierre Falardeau, Denys Arcand, Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Robin Spry, Jean-Claude Labrecque, Jean-Claude Lord, Mathieu Denis or more recently that of Félix Rose on the question. So many others… This mythology of revolt, filmed, recreated, censored or not, sheds light on its times. Basically works by men about manly struggles. “The FLQ ignored women a lot,” notes Garel. In his Manifesto, not a word about them. The directors paid it forward by focusing mainly on other subjects. Linked to national identity, this fight also attracted few new Quebecers. Today, Quebec society is transformed. Women filmmakers present their films everywhere. The struggles of activists and artists have been divided in favor of ecology, diversity, and civilian populations bombed abroad. » It seems so far away, so close, this crisis…
“Fifty years and dust later, October remains a painful scar, which still raises passions in the public space, written in the afterword of this work Félix Rose, whose documentary The Roses on the Chénier cell (award-winning) hit the headlines in 2020. Water has flowed under the bridges, but the Canadian government still refuses to recognize its wrongs and to apologize to the hundreds of Quebecers arrested without reasons or mandates after the application of the War Measures Act. »
Sylvain Garel adds: “The events of October once again demonstrate how fragile democracies are. It doesn’t take much for everything to turn into a dictatorial approach. But now we have to cut off social media first…”