Masarykova Univerzita V Brně

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Pravoslava Morávková Quebec Society in the Works of Three Quebec Film Directors Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. 2010 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature I would like to thank doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. for his support and valuable advice. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 6 2. Quebec Society from the Beginning of the 20th Century Up to Now ......................... 7 2. 1 Quebec Society and Its Transformation ................................................................. 7 3. Development of Quebec Cinema before and after the 1960s ................................... 13 3. 1 Quebec Cinema before the 1960s ........................................................................ 13 3. 2 Foundation of the National Film Board of Canada .............................................. 14 3. 3 Quebec Cinema after the 1960s ........................................................................... 16 3. 4 New Generation of Filmmakers in Quebec ......................................................... 17 3. 5 Résumé ................................................................................................................. 19 4. Claude Jutra and the Portrait of Quebec Society before the Quiet Revolution ........ 20 4. 1 Life and work of Claude Jutra ............................................................................. 20 4. 2 Significance of Place in Claude Jutra‟s Mon oncle Antoine ........................... 23 5. Denys Arcand and the Portrait of Quebec Society after the Quiet Revolution ........ 25 5. 1 Life and work of Denys Arcand .......................................................................... 25 5. 2 Search for Personal Happiness in Denys Arcand‟s Le Déclin de l’empire américain .................................................................................................................... 27 5. 3 Generation Gap in Denys Arcand‟s Les Invasions barbares ............................... 31 6. Robert Lepage and His Approach to Contemporary Quebec Society ...................... 33 6. 1 Life and Work of Robert Lepage ......................................................................... 33 6. 2 Individual Boundaries in Robert Lepage‟s La Face cachée de la lune ................... 35 7. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 37 8. Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 40 8. 1 Primary Sources ................................................................................................... 40 8. 2 Secondary Sources ............................................................................................... 40 8. 3 Works consulted .................................................................................................. 41 9. English Resumé ........................................................................................................ 42 10. Czech Resumé ........................................................................................................... 43 Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………...44 5 1. Introduction In the thesis Quebec society is explored by using the work of three important Quebec directors. As the expansion of Quebec cinema started in the 1960s, the thesis focuses on the period from the 1960s up to now. The directors concerned are Claude Jutra, Denys Arcand and Robert Lepage. In their work I observe the changes in Quebec society, especially the life of Quebec society before and after the shift from a rural society to an urban one and the resultant search for identity. Claude Jutra describes in his film Mon oncle Antoine (My Uncle Antoine, 1971) the former rural society in Quebec which was related to land. Families were very nearly all equal and the rural society was a culture with a high degree of internal social integration based on a short-term adjustment to the environment. I point out these features in Claude Jutra‟s film, especially the severe conditions of asbestos mines before the Asbestos Strike, and examine the situation before the shift of Quebec society. In Denys Arcand‟s work I observe the „new‟ Quebec society. Denys Arcand‟s films Le Déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire, 1986) and Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions, 2002) reflect the high and educated people after the shift to an urban society, the generation after the Quiet Revolution. People talk about their life and try to discover who they really are. In addition, the American influence on Canadian people is obvious in several Arcand‟s films. Robert Lepage‟s films, in particular La Face cachée de la lune (The Far Side of the Moon, 2003), describe rather the internal world of the people than their everyday life. In Lepage‟s work I would like to demonstrate that people in Quebec are unbalanced. They still search for their identity because they are not sure who they are. They are not Québecois, Canadians or Americans. In Lepage‟s films, people are only people, the individuals. 6 In my thesis I would like to prove that society in Quebec is on the one hand compact and on the other hand it is fragmented. It is a small nation, which disintegrates into a lot of individuals and each of them, not considering the fact that he or she is francophone or anglophone, still searches for his or her identity. 2. Quebec Society from the Beginning of the 20th Century Up to Now Up till the end of the 19th century the majority of Canada‟s society was rural. Population has grown in both urban and rural Canada since 1851. Urban population has been defined in terms of residence in incorporated cities and towns; rural population is composed of residents of non-urban areas. Within the rural populations are people who live in farms as well as non-farm residents. With the beginning of the new century Quebec society changed, people started to migrate from rural areas to urban centres. The following subchapter deals with the shift of Quebec society from a rural society to an urban one. It relies on three key events of the 20th century in Quebec – growth of industrialization, Asbestos strike and Quiet Revolution. It is based on Hubert Guindon‟s Quebec Society: Tradition, Modernity, and Nationhood. 2. 1 Quebec Society and Its Transformation According to the statistics in McKie‟s and Thompson‟s book, in 1851 87% of the total Canadian population lived in rural areas, and 13% lived in urban centres. In contrast, by 1986 only 23% of Canadians lived in rural areas and 77% of Canadians lived in urban areas (69). It is incredible that the character of Canadian population has extremely changed over one hundred years. As for Quebec, Canada‟s largest province, its population stayed for a long time rural. In 1890, the majority of Quebec population was rural and it persisted until the end of 1950s. The crucial role in the transformation 7 of Quebec society from the rural society to the urban one played the growth of industrialization in the beginning of the 20th century. Another important event was the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s. The rural society consisted in the relation of family to land, as Guindon claims, “in a loosely integrated collection of rural parishes geographically expanding” (46). The land was the most important ownership of the 19th century rural families, it was “tilled as a family enterprise and the goals were, first, the creation and maintenance of a unit of property sufficiently large to supply the family‟s daily needs and to provide subsistence for the aged, and, second, to provide as best might be for the settlement of the non- inheriting children” (Guindon 9-10). Most of the rural families lived on farms, which were inherited from one generation to another. Although it was important to give the land to their descendants, it was not the main component for development of society. The society was not based on the family itself and the family continuity was not paralleled by in landownership. “The passing of land through a single heir is only part of a wider cultural system in which it is an item of secondary importance. The society is not dominated by the family as the main determinant of social experience” (Guindon 10). In the 1920s with the growth of industrialization there were fewer heirs who could inherit the multigenerational land and therefore the owners of the land were forced to sell their farms to other buyers, which Guindon claims in his analysis: “we find that fourteen out of forty, or approximately one out of three, were initially sold because of the lack of a suitable heir” (11). The absence of suitable heir was only a minor factor. What affected the oncoming transformation of Quebec rural society was not the fact that families had to sell their farms, but it was the growth of industrialization. “By the beginning of the twentieth century, farming had lost its position as the largest employment sector” (Dickinson and Young 194). Although industrialization was 8 in its earlier stages, the balance between land and people was already precarious. The growth of industrialization was slow and the economic

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