The Effort to Forget: Collective Memory and Documentary Film in Québec A Thesis in The Department of Communication Studies Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts in Media Studies at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada O Philip Preville, 1997 National Library Bibliothèque nationale l*l of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395,nie Wellington Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference Our fi& Notre r8fdrence The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microforrn, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de rnicrofiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in ths thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or othenvise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author' s ou autrement reproduits sans son nemission.&- autorisation. NOTE TO USERS Page(s) not included in the original manuscript are unavailable from the author or university. The manuscript was microfilmed as received. This reproduction is the best copy available. UMI ABSTRACT The Effort to Forget: Collective Mernory and Documentary Film in Québec Philip Preville This thesis is an exploration of collective mernory with respect to Québec nationalisrn. Three documentaries are used as a case study through which to examine the primary themeo of collective memory in Québec: Denys i Arcand's Le Confort et 1'indifférence (1981), Donald Brittain's The Champions Part 3: The Final Battle (1983), and Jacques Godbout's Le Mouton noir (1992). Particular emphasis is placed upon the dynamics of forgetting in collective memory. Specifically, this thesis argues that forgetting is not the antithesis of memory, but its complement; forgetting emerges through the process of memory narrativization itself, as embodied through the documentary films. Conclusions are drawn with respect to the role of forgetting in the imagined community of the nation, and suggestions are formulated with respect to the understanding of collective amnesia in further study on collective memory. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am, by rny own account, stark raving mad. My mind is burdened with thought; 1 pace; 1 talk aloud to myself; 1 take pleasure in children's cartoons; 1 find endless fascination perusing the epitaphs of tombstones. My inability to limit the flow of reality, as you might well imagine, makes the fragility of life a rather threatening proposition. Each morning, I awake knowing that, at any given moment, I might suddenly fly apart, my body shattering into millions of pieces, my flesh transformed into crispy shards of stained glass. My continued perseverance on this earth, and the completion of this thesis, I owe to the many people who have rnitigated my madness over the years. First and foremost, 1 owe a tremendous debt to my family - my parents, my four brothers, and a vast array of other relatives. They have endowed me with a memory so rich, it fuels my imagination to a point beyond my control. Little did they know they were nurturing an intellectual obsession with the very concept of memory itself, an obsession that risked rocketing my mind into outer space. Or perhaps they did know: My mother, Doreen Ruth, and my father, Paul Alexander, have always counseled me to keep rny feet on the ground. Without them, this thesis would never have corne to completion. Yet despite their help 1 remain insane, my insanity now merely chained to the earth's crust. To my good fortune, I have been able to surround myself with a gaggle of other crazy people whose delirium I believe differs from mine only in inflection. Together, we are a cuckoo's nest of closet fruitcakes which, through mutual support, is able to interact effectively with the rest of the world. 1 must thank Daniel Doane and Susan Schutta, who taught me my first steps in the post-graduate asylum's nursery; Robert Kwak and Michael Debbané, men of unrivalled mania; Bertie Mandelblatt, who ha3 often lent her ear to my ravings; Robert Deleskie, a truly debonnair madman; Darcelle Hall, who brings a freshly daft outlook to al1 the world's incoherence; and Matthew Hays, who has been burdened with the task of carrying my sense of humour for me, as, unbeknownst to him, 1 delegated it to his trust some rnonths ago. Tina Verma, whose calm exterior belies her rabid lunacy, and 1 both found ourselves strapped in the thesis straightjacket side-by-side for many months; memories of Our time in the padded room will forever warm the cockles of my heart. Monique Tschofen, a pink elephant of sorts, was an inspirational apparition in a time of darkness. Chantal Nadeau, my thesis advisor, who in my mind's ever-dilated eye has becorne a mentor of sorts, has been a trernendous source of motivation and intellectual conversation. In French there is a saying: le génie frôle la folie. Two of my oldest friends, Paul Murphy and Ron Kuipers, fit this description perfectly. To my mind, they have mastered their madness and transformed it into genius. They know how to ground themselves and so do not need chains. At the same time, they are able to set their minds free without losing orientation; you might Say they have learned how to fly. Finally, Joya Balfour's steadfast character in the face of al1 dementia - including her own, but most particularly mine - is truly remarkable. Her voice sings the bats in my belfry to sleep; she fills my world with amenornania. More than any other, she allays rny fear of self-fragmentation and helps keep me whole. 1 am grateful to al1 these people and many more, as I have found inspiration through each and every one of them. Due to my prevailing condition, 1 can only hope this thesis provides some small reflection of the richness they bring to my thought and my life. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Memory's Lexicon .... Chapter One: Documentary Film, Memory, and Forgetting in Québec ............... Chapter Two: The Enemy Within: Documentary Representations of the 1980 Québec Referendum ............................................ 26 Chapter Three: Nostalgiamnesia: Family Values in Jacques Godbout's Le Mouton noir ............................................... Conclusion: Lest We Remember: The Trappings of Amnesia ................................................... 82 INTRODUCTION MEMORY'S LEXICON The Inuit, according to Margaret Visser, have over thirty different words which may be applied to the concept of snow. In Inuktitut, crusty snow, melting snow, powdered snow, and so forth are not distinguished through adjectives, which would merely diminish each one as a variation on the same theme; rather, each type of snow is endowed with its own noun, a separate existence in language - katakartanaq, mannguq, minguliq. The language's array of adjectives rnay then be applied, not to a single noun, but to a whole list of them, resulting in a vast and intricate lexicon intended for the sole purpose of describing the most minute inflections of winter. From her observations, Visser deducts the following maxim: "richness of vocabulary is a pointer to the importance a culture places"' upon particulas aspects of shared existence and experience. Based upon Visser's maxim, it would appear that memory is a linchpin of western culture. The lexicon applicable to different types of memory in western culture - be it the English or French language, to name only the two in which 1 am fluent - is particularly vast, calling attention to many small but important 1 From "It's snowing what to say", which appears in the February 1994 edition of Saturday Night magazine, page 30. Inuktitut goes so far as to make distinctions between different types of snowballs, and even gives a different name to snow which is gathered for melting into water. distinctions in the various ways we perform the act of remembering. One can cornmemorate, which is to preserve an event in memory through celebration; or, to take it a step further, one may memorialize, which is to commemorate specifically with respect to the dead. Similarly, a distinction is made between rerniniscence, the process of memory narrativization, and retrospection, which denotes an indulgence in past time. A retrieval is a momentary recovery of a particular event through memory; a revival seeks to entrench that event back into present consciousness. Remorse is a mode of rernembrance characterized by regret, while nostalgia is animated by sentimentality and wistfulness. Marty of these words are often used interchangeably, but they have their own separate existence for a reason: to give different inflections and different accents to the ways in which the past makes its presence felt.2 This vast vocabulary supports the notion that there is a "basic human need to live in extended structures of temporality" (Huyssen 1995: 9), for the language itself goes to great lengths to categorize the ways in which we reach back into the past - as if, somehow, it were an unavoidable compulsion that could not be contained and so needed to be understood in al1 its guises. The language even goes so far as to account for the loss of agency in the act of remembering: one may be haunted by a person's or event's persistence in memory, deçpite al1 best efforts to the contrary. Alas, western culture's obsession with remembering does not extend to forgetting.