Cinema as History

With a career spanning more than five decades, director and cinematographer Michel Brault is one of the most influential figures in Québécois cinema. Brault’s early works, including Les Raquetteurs and Pour la suite du monde, reflect a previously unacknowledged and unfulfilled need on the part of Québécois society to see its own culture depicted onscreen, and helped spark a cultural renaissance in Quebec. His 1974 fiction feature Les Ordres, which deals with the Quebec Liberation Front crisis and the invocation of the War Measures Act, has consistently been listed as one of the best Québécois and Canadian films to date. Brault’s work as cinematographer—on groundbreaking films such as Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971) and Francis Mankiewicz’s Les Bons Débarras (1980)—and his contributions to the development of the cinema-verité movement, have been equally significant.