In a video clip from the podcast Contact by Stéphan Bureau which has been circulating on social networks since December, we see filmmaker Denys Arcand telling that screenwriting students requested his dismissal after just one course.
Arcand had asked them to take a great novel, “any”, he said, and to adapt a chapter for the cinema. He gave as an example Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, War and peace, The Red and the Black. Arcand says a student raised his hand and asked, “Are those names you just said books?” »
No one in the class had read a single one of these novels, Arcand points out. Nor those of Hemingway or Faulkner. There was a “dead silence” when it came to The stranger.
The professor decided to cancel the rest of the course as well as that of the following week, in order to allow his students to “look for a paper object with letters on it, and it will be marked novel”, recounts Arcand with his irony usual.
The students, explains the filmmaker to Stéphan Bureau, immediately demanded his dismissal from management. “We are here to write. We’re not here to read! ”, they told him. This is how the excerpt ends, which promotes Contact.
On social networks, some defended the students and condemned a form of condescension perceived by the teacher. But most denounced the intellectual laziness of this generation of fragile little rabbits, lazy Cuddle Bears and snowflakes adept at the culture of banishment.
They would not have been reassured by the immediate aftermath of the interview. “We paid to write. We didn’t pay to read! », added the students, according to Arcand. The filmmaker regrets that there was no dialogue or common cultural references between them. We no longer know the work of Aristotle or Shakespeare, he says.
“Perhaps our references come from another era and there are others today,” replies Stéphan Bureau. The Kardashians, perhaps, could be a form of reference. »
As a caricature of today’s youth, a generation otherwise portrayed as uneducated in Willwe made it more original…
For the record, Denys Arcand was not fired by management. He clarifies this as soon as the extract broadcast on social networks ends. Arcand escaped the re-education camp woke and to the gulag archipelago of political correctness. It was not “cancelled”. He continued to teach and even became one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of Quebec.
Even if the extract from the podcast show is not clear on this subject, the “youth of today” to which Stéphan Bureau refers is not the same as that of Denys Arcand’s anecdote. The students Arcand is referring to are those of the generation of Youth todaythe popular Télé-Métropole show.
In the interview lasting more than an hour, around thirty seconds before the start of the extract which has been circulating since December, Arcand specifies that the screenwriting course he is talking about was given at UQAM… in 1973.
At the time, Denys Arcand was barely 30 years old and Stéphan Bureau was not 10 years old. These students who had not read Camus and who had no intention of reading Tolstoy are all over 70 years old today. They belong to a generation which, ironically, sometimes criticizes young people for being too lazy and selfish, not curious and polite enough, or too demanding and resistant to authority.
Some of them are former Marxist-Leninists who today see woke in their soup. No doubt at the time, they found it scandalous thatWe are in cottona documentary co-directed in 1970 by Arcand, was censored by the NFB due to pressure from the textile industry (it was not broadcast until 1976).
This story reminds us that there are dangers in jumping to conclusions and relying on an extract taken out of context. It also illustrates prejudices, sometimes unconscious, which suggest that “it was better before”.
It made me think of a recent report1 by my colleague Judith Lachapelle, who began with the testimony of a Quebec employer who criticized young people for not wanting to work… published in The Press in 1975.
The more it changes, the more it is the same. Throughout history, according to the experts interviewed by my colleague, the oldest have tended to denigrate the youngest. “Reading enthusiasts find that young people read less,” notes Judith. She cites the findings of researchers who demonstrate that people tend to both “be particularly critical of today’s young people about things they themselves excel at” and to apply their own experience to all individuals. of their generation.
I read Stendhal, Camus, even Sartre and Malraux as a teenager, never imagining for a moment that my classmates were doing the same. On the other hand, I regret the time when, like in 1973 with Réjeanne Padovani, Denys Arcand courageously denounced in his films those who have power, and not those who challenge it. It was better before ? Sometimes yes.