Born at the end of the 19th centurye century, cinema is a much younger art than literature, theater or painting. Still. The seventh art constitutes a formidable sounding board of our time.
Of course, cinema entertains us, educates us, confronts us with a thousand and one feelings. But it is just as much an instrument of demand, of introspection, of confrontation. It is a vector of our history, a reflection of who we are. He is a witness as well as an agitator. He pushes and denounces. He testifies without imposing.
These are some impressions that remain with us from reading Go look elsewherea book of short and dense essays on the cinema of the beginning of the century as experienced, felt, understood and analyzed by Guillaume Lafleur, of the Cinémathèque québécoise.
Nice title that Go look elsewhere. A sincere invitation to break away from the modus operandi, as much imposed by the industry as by the mass media, to consume cinematographic works in a very, very restricted space-time.
A film does not live solely through the opinion of the viewer or the critic. It also, if not more, finds its meaning in dialogue with its time, with other works, with social movements and many other elements.
“I approach each of my books and my texts through a few films. But there are dozens of films that fuel my comments on these few films, said the author in an interview. The position I take in the book is that of a spectator who accumulates knowledge about cinema and is also interested in the particularity of the art of filming. This accumulation of viewings, layers, reflections, memories of other films nourishes the subject. »
Mr. Lafleur’s analytical work is done through a few clusters of texts, written in the past for specialized magazines or unpublished, on films which respond to each other, speak to each other, complement each other. Of course, this requires an effort of concentration. But the analysis here is fine without being picky. The statement is relevant without being pontificating.
To take an example, his rereading of Kanehsatake, 270 years of resistancea documentary by Alanis Obomsawin, is brilliant and instructive in terms of the filmmaker’s very assumed and assertive stance in the face of the deep roots of what has been called the Oka crisis.
In the same way, Guillaume Lafleur guides us through three Romanian films to show that this national cinematography was able to resist the steamroller of an industry addicted to a race to the bottom, while documenting the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime and its aftermath. .
The best thing about it is that the film buff/reader will be able to return to the work several times as their cinematic knowledge expands. We benefit from keeping the work and coming back to it from time to time.
“I am addressing readers who are curious about the era in which they live,” confides Guillaume Lafleur. And he’s right. His proposal is an invitation to dive into an art that has never finished revealing its secrets.
Extract
“The facilitated circulation of capital seems to have accelerated a standardization of production standards, at the same time when the criteria determining the canons of auteur cinema were shaping an international cinephile increasingly detached from a singular historical experience. This is how a stylistic current linked to a community of creators from the same country and the same culture becomes rarefied. In this context, Romanian cinema is in a league of its own, measuring the repercussions of the end of the Eastern bloc. »
Who is Guillaume Lafleur?
Director of distribution, programming and publications at the Cinémathèque québécoise, Guillaume Lafleur has, over the past 25 years, published around a hundred articles and essays on contemporary cinema, the history of Quebec cinema, and experimental cinema. and the aesthetics of the film. In 2015 he published the work Minority practices, fragments of a little-known history of Quebec cinema (1937-1973) at Varia.
Go look elsewhere
All in all
176 pages