Arguing With Ethnography_ the Films of Bob Quinn and Pierre Perrault - Jerry White

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Arguing with Ethnography: The Films of Bob Quinn and Pierre

Perrault

White, Jerry, 1971-

Cinema Journal, 42, Number 2, Winter 2003, pp. 101-124 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press

DOI: 10.1353/cj.2003.0006

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Cinema Journal 42, No. 2, Winter 2003 101

Arguing with Ethnography: The Films ofBob Quinn and Pierre Perrault

by Jerry White

This article discusses the films of Pierre Perrault and Bob Quinn, which are en- gaged in a kind of discussion with ethnographic practice and nationalist discourse.Both filmmakers are fascinated by the experiences of those at the fringes of their nation-states, especially island and diasporic communities, favoring the expositionof ambiguity and hybridity over simplified understandings of national experiences.

Ethnographic filmmaking has undergone a complete transformation in the lasttwo decades. Once the safe vocation of earnest scientists seeking imagery of exotic

cultures, ethnographic filmmaking has become a fertile ground for revision by Third World and avant-garde filmmakers. This transformation has been the subject of a great deal of recent scholarly work, including Laura U. Marks’s The Skinof the Film and Catherine Russell’s Experimental Ethnography, as well as of many articles in journals such as Visual Anthropology Review.1

This reevaluation was occasioned in no small part by the tremendous changesin ethnographic and cine-ethnographic practice that began in the 1950s. While rep-resenting different periods in this shift, Bob Quinn and Pierre Perrault are twofilmmakers whose work illuminates many of the problems that define the revisionisttendency in ethnography. Their films also share many similarities with those of JeanRouch, whose experiments with ethnographic subjectivity were roughly contempo-rary with those of Perrault. Indeed, Perrault’s films bear the mark of these experi-ments; the Québécois filmmaker shares with his French colleague an interest in

breaking down barriers between subject and object and also enunciates a radicalpolitical project that is inseparably linked to the process of ethnography itself.

Like Rouch’s Les Maitres Fous (1955) and Jaguar (1967), Perrault’s ethno-graphic documents were realized through the close involvement of the partici-pants and rendered in a semifictional style. Rouch sought to put people insemifictional situations that echoed their own lives, so as to document not only aculture but to illuminate the interior lives of the people who make up that culture.

Rouch also seems to have had some influence, however indirect, on Quinn.Indeed, the filmmaking styles of both Perrault and Quinn are closer to that of Rouch than to the more aggressively experimental ethnography of the 1970s–1990s, which includes the widely discussed work of Trinh T. Minh-ha. In fact,

Jerry White is an assistant professor of film studies at the University of Alberta and president

of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies. His articles have appeared in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Éire-Ireland, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and Documen- tary Box, and he has done programmatic and educational work for the Philadelphia,Edmonton, Taos, and Telluride film festivals.



102 Cinema Journal 42, No. 2, Winter 2003

these formal experiments, which are roughly contemporary with Quinn’s work(and less so with Perrault’s), seem to have had little visible impact on Quinn,

despite the discernible effect they have had on experimental ethnography in thelast two and half decades. Quinn’s work is more fruitfully linked to what DavidMacDougall has called “ethnobiography,” a term taken from Argentine filmmakerJorge Preloran, whose Imaginero (1969) MacDougall considers a good exampleof the genre. He writes that

ethnobiography, whatever its aims as advocacy, attempts to create portraits of individu-als of other cultures in some psychological and historical depth. While it is ostensibly a

way of writing culture from the inside through an insider’s perspective, it is framed by an outsider’s concerns. In its doubling of subjectivities and its attempt to reconstitutethe culturally different historical person it creates a conundrum, the charged space of an encounter.2

MacDougall invokes films such as Hubert Smith’s The Spirit Possession of

Alejandro Mamani (1975), John Marshall’s N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman(1980), and Peter Loïzos’s Sophia’s People (1985) as examples of the genre, in thatthey are “ethnographic films that concern the consciousness of individual socialactors.”3 In Quinn’s work, as with a number of more clearly ethnographic films of the period, we can begin to see a drift away from macroanalysis toward somethingmore intimate.

To be certain, there are considerable historical differences between Quinnand Perrault; the former was making films in an essentially post-Rouchian era,

while the latter was Rouch’s contemporary. But while Quinn’s work is certainly part of the shift toward subjective or impressionistic forms that was characteristicof ethnographic filmmaking in the 1970s, there is a sense throughout his films thatin form and ideology Quinn is very close indeed to Perrault and to Rouch. Thisshould not come as a surprise for, far from being a rejection of the Rouchian model,

the ethnobiographical movement of the 1970s and 1980s was an extension of Rouch’sbelief in the need to break down barriers between the documenter and the docu-mented, between fiction and science.

So, despite their being of different generations, procedurally, formally, andideologically, Quinn and Perrault have quite a bit in common. Both have madefilms in semicollaborative ways, with other professional filmmakers and with thepeople in the communities they were filming, in a way that was similar to butmuch more moderate than the collaborative mode of production that marked therhetoric of Third Cinema. The politics of Quinn’s and Perrault’s films also echo

without fully subscribing to the radical political project of the Third Cinema move-ment, reflecting Rouch’s radical political outlook. Unlike Rouch, however, Quinnand Perrault find their national experiences in locations that are on the fringes of a nation-state as such, both focus on maritime or island communities, and bothfind national borders to be too constrictive for their projects. Perrault and Quinnalso linger on nonurban ways of life, on languages that are likely to be incompre-hensible to the inhabitants of the urban center, and on the economically underde-

veloped aspects of these cultures.




Both filmmakers, then, are closely linked to nationalist movements, but bothare also engaging in efforts to radically revise the meaning of nationhood, showing

such discourse to be far more complex and contradictory than their mainstreamadvocates have implied. With respect to these issues, Perrault’s l’Île-aux-Coudrestrilogy (1963–1967), and especially Pour la suite du monde (1963, codirected withMichel Brault4) and Quinn’s Poitín (1977) and The Bishop’s Story (1993) are par-ticularly interesting. Moreover, both Quinn and Perrault continued their projectsof nationalist revision by examining their films’ global implications. Perrault, in Un pays sans bon sens! (1970), is examining the same internationalism that preoccu-pies Quinn in his Atlantean films (1983 and 1997); there are also similar points of contact in their works on diaspora, such as L’Acadie, l’Acadie?!? (1971, codirected

with Michel Brault) and Pobol í London / Flytippers (1987). Quinn and Perraultare, across a body of work that is very diverse indeed, putting forward a form of nationalism that resists some of the basics of that endeavor. They are also arguingfor a form of globalization that denies the homogenization that so many fear is its

logical conclusion. While Perrault and Quinn are not as radically experimental as the filmmakersMarks and Russell discuss, they share the ideological and political concerns out-lined in their works, without the alienating elitism that sometimes characterizesthe avant-garde. Rather than actively resisting or rejecting, Perrault and Quinnseek to embody the idealism that, while seldom visible, has always been essentialto their chosen form of filmmaking (documentary), political projects (national-ism), and profession (ethnographer). After explaining the ways that they deal withthe impact that Robert Flaherty has had on cinematic ethnography, I shall show how Quinn and Perrault draw on the experience of islanders so as both to illustratean idea of national self and to show how that idea is complex and unstable, eventhough “purity” is often associated with coastal and island life. Quinn and Perraultfurther undermine that purity by examining the way that extraterritorial situa-

tions, such as migration and diaspora, further nationalist movements.

The Ghost of Flaherty. Does it matter that the protagonists in Nanook of the North (1922) did not live the way they seem to in Flaherty’s famous documentary?Is it important that the man at the center of Man of Aran (1934), regularly her-alded as a documentary classic, is not an islander at all but actor Tiger King? Ques-tions like these continue to plague film debates. Quinn and Perrault are importantin no small part because of the innovative answers they propose. In essence, they have gone Flaherty one better, making films that are as manipulated and artificialas the semifictional cinema of their American godfather. At the same time, Quinnand Perrault have made that artificiality a central part of their films; there is no Nanook-style faked naturalism in the oeuvre of either filmmaker.

The link between Flaherty and Quinn would seem to be more explicit than thatbetween Flaherty and Perrault, given that the former men both made films aboutIreland’s coastal and island regions. But in Ireland, Man of Aran evokes very mixedfeelings, as contemporary ideas about remote areas shift away from the romantic

visions for which Flaherty was famous toward a more realist view that takes into




account the ambiguous version of modernity one finds on the islands. Lance Pettitthas noted that “the Irish premiere of Man of Aran was greeted by Irish government

approval since it was seen to endorse the dominant ideology of self-reliance andacetic frugality of 1930s Ireland.”5 This was hardly the reception that awaited Quinn’sfirst feature, the Connemara-set Poitín,6 which was greeted by calls for it to bebanned or destroyed when it was aired on St. Patrick’s Day in 1979.7 Quinn’s vision of Gaeltacht8 life is defined by frustrated inhabitants with little to do but wait in line forthe dole, traffic in illegal liquor, and violently express feelings of pent-up anger; this

was a long way from Flaherty’s rugged but lovely Inishmore.The representation of Gaeltacht life in general was also significantly different

in Quinn’s film and seemed to be calculated to respond to the way Flaherty imag-ined the place, an image that still held enormous sway in the Irish popular con-sciousness. Writing in the Sunday Independent, Ciaran Carty drew an explicitcomparison between Poitín and Man of Aran, asserting that Quinn “implicitly de-romanticizes the Robert Flaherty images of the rugged West as a place of primal

dignity where man does noble battle with the elements and frail currachs bravethe relentless Atlantic surf while women stoically tend the stew-pots at turf fires.”9

Flaherty’s debt to American romanticism and its associated ideas about man andnature is well known and widely discussed. Quinn is coming from a very differentsociocultural space, that of the linguistic-rights movement, known as CeartaSibhialta na Gaeltachta, which emerged in the Gaeltacht areas in the late 1960s.Nuala C. Johnson writes that, “in common with civil rights movements in NorthAmerica and Europe, the terms of the public debate in part shifted away fromnarrow debates about nationhood to broader questions related to equal opportu-nity and civil liberties.”10

But although Quinn’s approach could be said to be more realist and politically conscious than Flaherty’s, Poitín is a fiction film, whereas Man of Aran is, or atleast has often been treated as, a documentary. Poitín, however, draws on many

conventions of documentary: it was shot on grainy 16mm, Quinn used mostly non-professional actors, and the emphasis is on the details of everyday life. Man of Aran, conversely, is heavily dependent on fictional techniques, Flaherty usednonsynch sound, and the film consists mostly of sequences that are obviously re-enacted and that were then edited according to classical Hollywood film grammar.

William Rothman claims that “Flaherty’s pioneering work marks a moment beforethe distinction between fiction and documentary was set, before the term ‘docu-mentary film’ was coined.”11 This is a moment whose possibilities and sense of discovery Bob Quinn was clearly trying to recapture.

Like many Québec filmmakers of the 1960s, Perrault was seeking a cinematicpractice in which fiction and nonfiction interact. Pour la suite du monde is his filmthat is the most clearly indebted to Flaherty. Nanook and Man of Aran have bothbeen strongly criticized for featuring images of hunting and fishing techniques that

were no longer in use in the 1920s and 1930s (the participants in both films requiredextensive instruction from Flaherty); Pour la suite du monde also has as its centralsubject a method of beluga hunting that is no longer practiced on l’Île-aux-Coudres.Unlike Flaherty, however, Perrault lets his viewers know he is highly conscious of this




fact. The film opens with text that tells how the filmmakers had to convince theinhabitants to revive the hunt, and the first reel or so consists of shots of peoplearguing, at meetings and in small groups, about whether that is a good idea.

Perrault, along with Michel Brault, is often associated with the rise of cinémadirect and cinéma vérité in North America, an entirely reasonable assessment givenhis use of lightweight camera gear and his tendency to eschew voice-overs. ButPerrault was also comfortable with a certain level of artifice, of manipulation; wherethe vérité comes in is when he makes it absolutely clear that he has in some waysmanipulated the situation. Explaining the push and pull between active collabora-tion with the inhabitants of l’Île-aux-Coudres and the desire for neutral documen-tation of their activities, Gilles Marsolais writes that

in the Flaherty film, Nanook acts out the situation, he doesn’t try to make us believe the

opposite, and the complicity established between him and Flaherty is communicated tothe spectator; in Pour la suite du monde, the people aren’t playing; they are, but this typeof triangular complicity is no less real. . . . Even if the cameraman makes himself discreetand integrates himself into the action, the people are aware that the camera is witnessingeverything they do or everything they say. They are not dupes; nor are they betrayed.12

Figure 1. Bob Quinn’s Poitín (1977) was shot on grainy 16mm, used mostly non-professional actors, and emphasized the details of everyday life. The situations aremore or less fictional, although also representative of the people’s lives. Courtesy Irish Film Archive.




The complexity of this formulation offers a good sense of the multilayered, some-times conflicted way that Perrault interacts both with the subjects of his documen-

tary and with documentary history itself.Like Quinn, Perrault wants to revise the belief that life in remote areas isperfect, that such places are premodern paradises. This misconception is less di-rectly influenced by Flaherty in Québec than in Ireland. Some influence is cer-tainly present, though (perhaps partially because Nanook was filmed in Ungava, aregion of northern Québec), and Perrault and Flaherty share a romantic impulse,although Perrault allows his romanticism to be tempered by the material reality of his situation and the perspective of his participants, who are never transformedinto actors in quite the way they are in Flaherty films. Phillipe Pilard would agree.He writes that “a Perrault version of Man of Aran . . . would have showed an actualfamily, a real fisherman, described the community, integrated research, folktales,stories, and history. Flaherty wants to bend reality to the dimensions of his dreams.”13

Perrault’s project in his l’Île-aux-Coudres trilogy is certainly to evoke a

nonurban, nonmodern way of life, but he is less a storyteller, less a legend-weaver,than Flaherty. Perrault’s l’Île-aux-Coudres has trucks and television, and resi-dents even travel to the U.S. and, in Le règne du jour , to France. Moreover, in Les voitures d’eau (1969), the cycle’s third film, the economic problems of theisland, especially with regard to the control of maritime commerce, are discussedin some detail.

This difference is most pronounced in the way Flaherty and Perrault dealt with the Acadians. Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948) is a semifictional portrait of the rough, dignified, and utterly antimodern life in a Louisiana swamp; Perraultand Brault’s L’Acadie, l’Acadie?!? is about the sometimes-militant struggle for lin-guistic rights by students at the Université de Moncton in New Brunswick. Perraultand Flaherty have very similar interests indeed, but only the American was willingto bend reality. Perrault just nudged it a bit.

Both Quinn and Perrault are following what George E. Marcus describes asthe modernist trend in recent anthropological writing and filmmaking. Calling at-tention to the recent turn away from ideals of scientific objectivity and toward theuse of both narrative and montage, he writes that

this shift toward constructing the real through narrative rather than through classifica-tion is stimulated, I believe, not by some aesthetic preference but rather by a shift in thehistoric conditions. . . . The shift affects the way anthropology constructs its object (cer-tainly no longer the primitive outside a modern world system) and how it argues for theauthority of its own representations of otherness in a much more complex field of suchrepresentations. It is a field occupied by diverse others who aggressively and eloquently “speak for themselves” in the same media and to the same publics within which anthro-pologists once felt themselves to occupy a secure position.14

Bob Quinn, whose fiction and documentary films are about essentially the samesubjects, is very much a child of this transformation. Cultural anthropology andethnography in Ireland had previously been projects wherein an English-speakingelite sought inspiration and national mythology from the country’s island fringes;




the flow of culture was always from the islands to the center. Quinn, a transplantedDubliner who has lived in Connemara for almost thirty years, has a very good sense

of how unworkable that model now is. He is trying to find a modus operandi thatcombines elements of both fiction and documentary and that uses both actors andlocals more or less playing themselves (there are few professional actors in any of Quinn’s films; he uses mostly people who live nearby).

Perrault, especially in his l’Île-aux-Coudres trilogy, reveals a similarly mod-ernist skepticism toward conventions. As we shall see, Perrault’s cinema is one in

which the influences of the author and the subjects are equally felt; the subjectsspeak freely about their lives (lives that, as in Quinn’s films, most urbanites wouldprobably find foreign), and documentary and poetic objectives coexist. His filmsfollow conventions of narrative and ethnography at the same time that they slowly reconstruct these forms, calling into question the legitimacy of filmic boundaries

without fully stepping outside them.Just as I do not wish to romanticize Rouch, whose relationship with French

colonial authority is not entirely unproblematic, I do not wish unrealistically to casti-gate Flaherty, whose use of an artificial aesthetic was, as William Rothman has ar-gued, entirely consistent with the period in which he worked. Indeed, rather thansiding with the one filmmaker and against another, I believe that what Perrault andQuinn are trying to do is take something from each approach. One could argue thatRouch’s self-consciousness is a precursor to postmodernist documentary, with its in-sistence on the staged character of everything. There is no such move towardpostmodern cynicism in either Perrault or Quinn; although they are aware of the

ways they are manipulating their subjects, there is intact in their films a quest forauthenticity, a quest that also drove Flaherty, even in his stagiest moments. As weshall see, this “middle path,” this ethic of compromise and negotiation, is character-istic of the work of both filmmakers.

Islands. Perrault’s l’Île-aux-Coudres trilogy and Quinn’s fiction films aboutConnemara and its surrounding islands, while having many obvious differences,provide excellent starting places for an examination of the ways these filmmakersare revising but not entirely abandoning the ethnographic traditions in their pur-suit of a revised nationalist understanding of their respective cultures. Perraultand Quinn have ended up finding similar problems at the heart of island life, in-cluding battles between tradition and modernity and the need to revise documen-tary and narrative forms in a way that is consistent with their projects. As we see inQuinn’s Poitín and The Bishop’s Story and in Perrault’s Pour la suite du monde,nationalism is a compelling but contradictory project.

One of the most surprising aspects of Quinn’s films about Connemara and itsneighboring islands is the way they deal with the region’s integration into contem-porary Ireland. The Bishop’s Story, Quinn’s most recent narrative film, tells thestory of a priest on Clare Island who falls in love with a young woman (DonalMcCann and Maggie Fegan, respectively). The film centralizes a nonurban,deanglicized Ireland at the same time that it refuses to romanticize this way of lifeor to be coy about the status of the Irish language in Ireland as a whole. This




antiromantic viewpoint is made evident from the beginning of the film: it opens ina home for alcoholic priests where a cynical, tired old bishop who has long since

lost anything even close to religious faith is gently lecturing a younger man who isthere because he molested altar boys. When they are in the home, they speakEnglish, but when the film shifts to flashbacks of the priest’s experiences on theisland, accounting for most of the film, the dialogue is in a very echoey Irish. TheIrish is translated not in subtitles but in silent movie-style intertitles.

This part of the narrative begins by showing the woman headed toward theisland, her attempted suicide by jumping off a ferry, and her reunion with thepriest, who helped her when he was working in London. When he meets her, sheis recovering in bed, and one of the first things he does is look at her arm, where hesees needle tracks. Viewers may have expected to see small, beat-up ferries andbearded, sweater-wearing islanders, and they are present here, but one of thosebearded islanders confides to the priest that he is almost relieved that his child wasstillborn, so utterly is the island lacking in opportunities or a future for young

people. These three figures, then—the suicidal heroin addict, the spiritually andeconomically depressed islander, and the serious, devout but sexual priest—are allcues that the film will ride a very fine line between advocating for and exploding amainstream understanding of island life in the late twentieth century.

Indeed, The Bishop’s Story draws attention to anachronistic elements of lifeon the island, although there is a palatable tension in the way this is conveyed. Inone very important scene involving a boat race, the boats are a little longer thanrowboats and so accommodate three oarsmen. There are no signs of tourists, lightindustry, or the other urban-oriented economic strategies being actively tried onsome Irish islands. Most important, perhaps, Quinn makes it clear how tightknitthe community is and how much the parish priest is at its center. But these signifiersof antiquity—older-style race boats, older forms of work, images of an empty land-scape, the focus on tightly knit community life, even the use of sepia-toned stock

for the flashbacks—are not elaborated or even lingered on.The boat race is photographed in ways that maximize its kinetic and pictorial

value, using medium shots that follow alongside the boats as they move throughthe water and close-ups of the oars and of the men’s faces (in a way that almostrecalls Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia [1936]). But the boat race sequence is quickly integrated into the film’s narrative, as the priest gets punched in the face whenhe breaks up a fight among the competitors; this serves as an omen of the badthings to come.

Similarly, the landscape is photographed in long shots that make the charactersseem like specks amid the rough beauty of the island, but Quinn holds these shotsfor only a short time before moving into medium shots that advance the narrative ina not quite classical Hollywood cinema sort of way. His goal here is clearly to com-municate that the island is impoverished but still beautiful, but by not lingering onthe barren landscape Quinn encourages his viewer to internalize that fact and tomove on. Indeed, at the beginning of the film, he refers to the place as a“Godforsaken island.” The community on the island seems quite impoverished—all




the houses are small and run-down—but we are not shown the details. Being a littleGodforsaken is just a fact of nontouristic, nonurban life, a life that has almost van-

ished as the gentrification of Ireland’s west nears completion. Quinn seems to thinkit not worth dwelling on details for melodramatic/emotional effect.But in what way is any of this ethnographic? How does this fundamentally

narrative film engage in a semianthropological investigation of modernity in a re-mote area? Bill Nichols defines ethnographic film in a way that is particularly use-ful for my purposes here. Ethnographic films, he says, “are extra-institutional, . . .address an audience larger than anthropologists per se . . . may be made by indi-

viduals more trained in filmmaking than in anthropology, and accept as a primary task the representation or self-representation of one culture for another.”15 Thefirst three points seem self-evident: The Bishop’s Story is a semifictional film andthus not limited to issues of cultural anthropology, and it was made by someone

who was trained as a filmmaker at Ireland’s state-owned TV service, Radio TelefísÉireann (RTÉ), not as an anthropologist. The fourth feature is less clearly present,

but by looking for it, we get a good sense of what Quinn is up to politically. Thereis more going on here than using the details of nonurban life for spectacle or nar-rative grist, as a classical Hollywood movie would (or as John Ford’s The QuietMan [1952], that bête noir of Irish independent film, does).

Throughout The Bishop’s Story, there is a push and pull between whether the viewer is meant to read the images of traditional nonurban life, such as the boatrace and the practice of a paganistic religion, as explaining the narrative or whetherthe narrative is meant to explain these images of nonurban life to a national andinternational audience. The Bishop’s Story was, after all, finished on the fairly ex-pensive medium of 35mm film. In short, the film has both ethnographic and nar-rative elements.

We can conclude, therefore, that in The Bishop’s Story, Quinn was trying torewrite the conventions of narrative film along ethnographic lines. He takes this

project as seriously as did many Québec filmmakers of the 1960s (and, for thatmatter, a good deal more seriously than, say, the filmmakers associated with theDanish Dogme 95 movement), who similarly tried to refashion narrative cinematicform in a way that incorporated documentary techniques.

Quinn’s film is indeed fiction: it was shot in a more or less preplanned way, andit was edited along more or less classical Hollywood lines. It even goes an extra stepto announce its artificiality with the use of intertitles. Yet it aspires to the status of documentary: its ethnographic elements are palatable (such as the images of thelong boats, specific to that region), and while it certainly has a narrative drive, thefilm is equally a portrait of an anachronistic community facing modernity. As weshall see with Pour la suite du monde (and with most of Perrault’s films, for thatmatter), the overall effect is to call into question the validity of terms like “fiction”and “documentary.” This ambiguity is at the heart of what Catherine Russell calls“experimental ethnography.” She finds Jean Rouch’s use of the term “science fic-tion” helpful in explaining the hybridized genre that gives her book its title: “Theincorporation of ‘fiction’ into ethnography is a metaphor for subjectivity, desire,




fantasy, and imagination that might be fused with the empirical, indexical documen-tary image. Beyond mere truth, cinéma vérité could potentially produce a new real-

ity, a science fiction blending objective science and subjective art.”16

Overall, then, The Bishop’s Story is about the collision of modernity and tradi-tion and was made with an aesthetic sensibility that is itself a collision of scientific/ ethnographic and fictional impulses. Throughout the film, Quinn goes out of his

way, although not too far, to show us how different life on Clare Island is from life inurban Ireland. Writing in Film Ireland, Quinn recalled that the basis for The Bishop’sStory, Fr. Pádraig Standún’s 1983 novel Súil le Breith (The Eye of Judgment),

appealed to me because it revealed the unique tolerance toward sexual peccadilloesthat I had long discovered existed in Connemara and which survived in no other com-munity in this theocratic state. There were few gray areas. The story was black and

white, freshness versus tradition, innocence versus the monolith. There were no antihe-roes, no ambiguous sex, no vicarious violence, and no northern backdrop.17

The thematic matters in The Bishop’s Story are more complicated than Quinnsuggests here, although the binaries he alludes to provide an interesting entranceinto the film. For Quinn, Clare Island is where the struggles of modern Irish society are being hashed out, where people seek cultural and spiritual autonomy at the same

Figure 2. The Bishop’sStory (Bob Quinn,

1993) shows how

different life on ClareIsland is from life in

urban Ireland. Cour-tesy Irish Film

Archive.




time as they incorporate modernity. This split between modernity and autonomy isleft unresolved, however; these two conditions bleed into one another. Films that are

black and white, after all, are seldom that; they are mostly gray. Indeed, The Bishop’sStory is one such gray film, a statement that Irish islands, once thought to be therepository of Ireland’s national soul, are complex, embattled places, unarguably im-portant, and still central to an understanding of the life of the nation but also badly misunderstood.

A very similar project is at the heart of Pour la suite du monde. The first in-stallment of Perrault’s l’Île-aux-Coudres trilogy, this film centers on the revival of the beluga hunt on that small island in the St. Lawrence. Like The Bishop’s Story,at its core is a tension between narrative and nonnarrative aspirations. On onelevel, Pour la suite du monde is linear, following the hunt from its planning to itsrealization to the delivery of the beluga to an aquarium in New York. At the sametime, the film is poetic, as Perrault often used very long takes and dwelled onmeticulously composed images for no clear narrative reason. This poetic quality

marks an important difference between Perrault’s film and The Bishop’s Story, whose nonnarrativeness derives from its documentary portraiture rather than itspoetry as such.

Pour la suite du monde has a number of very famous shots—an extreme longshot of the islanders stacking poles into the water at dusk (in 1996, that imageappeared on a Canadian stamp), shots of a winter festival where the islanders wear

white masks and go from house to house, and shots of Louis Harvey (Grand Louis)collecting Easter water and then giving it to puzzled kids. The film is also notablefor its use of subtitles. The islanders are all allowed to speak at great length (acharacteristic feature of Perrault’s style, which has come to be known as the cinémade la parole), but the islanders speak a dialect of French that is, to say the least,distinct, and so the subtitles translate what they say into French. Emerging just asthe Quiet Revolution18 was getting under way, the film stands today as a central

text in Québec’s collective struggle to locate, advocate for, and most importantintegrate into modernity the unassimilable aspects of its culture. This struggle ar-guably defined the 1960s and 1970s in French-speaking Canada.

Perrault’s insistence on being self-reflexive about the recreated nature of thebeluga hunt is entirely consistent with the hybridized portrait of the island hecreates. There are more signifiers of antiquity in Pour la suite du monde than inThe Bishop’s Story, but Perrault’s view of the island’s relation to modernity is justas melancholy and conflicted as Quinn’s is. In one scene, from which the title isderived, a few men are sitting around talking about why they should revive thehunt, and Grand Louis opines to the local priest that “nous autres . . . d’aprèsnot’expérience, père Abel, on fait quelque chose pour la suite du monde” [the restof us . . . according to our experience, Fr. Abel, we do something so that the worldcan continue].19 This sounds very idealistic indeed, but as Michel Brûlé argues, itis in fact reflective of a pessimism that lies at the core of the film:

The entire film is clear about this need to construct a continuation of the world. . . . We seein this film that, contrary to a past time, the continuation of the world no longer goes




without saying; it has become uncertain and problematic. . . . Something has to be done toensure its continuation, to avoid a rupture in a world that has been built by pain andmisery. It is therefore a question here of the past of a world and of its problematic future.20

Indeed, if an argument is being made in Pour la suite du monde, it is thattraditional hunting techniques and oral culture are disappearing and need to bepreserved, if only through visual records like a film or oral records like knowledgeof how to hunt for belugas. The film celebrates this vanishing culture withoutromanticizing it or appropriating it for a nationalist project, and the filmmakers try to make the most out of cutting-edge lightweight cameras and sound gear withoutlosing their subjective voice.

Of the three films in the Île-aux-Coudres trilogy, Pour la suite du monde is themost folkloric, since La règne du jour deals with a trip to France and Les voituresd’eau deals with changes in the maritime economy. But rather than indulging inthe folklore that defined an earlier ethnographic tradition in Québec, Perrault isentering into a dialogue, trying to recover what is beautiful and lyrical about theisland and is clear that he is conducting an active inquiry into both its culture andhis own processes of image-making.

Jane Gaines has complained about the use of cinéma vérité aesthetics by Appalshop, a renowned media arts workshop in the Appalachian mountains of

Figure 3. Pierre Perrault’s Pour la suite du monde (1963) portrays a method of beluga hunting that was no longer practiced on l’Île-aux-Coudres. This image ap-peared on a Canadian stamp in 1996. Courtesy Cinémathèque Québécoise.




Kentucky (whose working methods were heavily influenced by the National FilmBoard of Canada, particularly the “Challenge for Change” program):

Unlike the ethnographic or folklore-record films, the Appalshop folk documentaries insome instances actually thread the cultural transmission process into the film itself,making the “handing down” aspect explicit rather than implicit. This incorporation of part of the process is one solution to the cinéma vérité restrictions. Giving the culturalrecipient a part in the film gets around the vérité ban on the intruding presence of ethnographer or interviewer, but it also has the effect of smoothing over the whole sothat none of the rough edges of the transmission process seem evident.21

Unlike the classical vérité cinema that Gaines sees emerging in Appalshop docu-mentaries, Perrault integrates the process of filmmaking into the film itself, andnot just by showing the filmmakers or sound people from time to time. Indeed,

writing about the revision of documentary form in Pour la suite du monde, RobertDaudlin asserts that “Perrault’s cinema ‘fictionalizes’ reality; it uses the methods

of the direct, and only those, to create actual fictions which nevertheless aspire tothe status of documentaries.”22

This process leaves most of the film’s rough edges intact; consider, for ex-ample, the footage of town meetings and small-group discussions in which localsdiscuss whether the revival of the hunt is a good idea. Further, the lyrical, poeticimpulses for which Perrault is famous also represent a departure from traditional

vérité filmmaking. The opening sequence, with boats pulling into port, is assembled very carefully: Perrault cuts between highly composed long shots and extremelong shots of the decks and hulls of the boats against the snowy, rugged landscapeand a medium close-up of the ship captain on the radio, bidding farewell for an-other winter to the controller in Québec City.

Given how composed and fluid these images feel, it is hard to think of them astransparent, “truthful” documentation, although there are many moments in the

film that aspire to that status, such as the sequences of the church auction and of the dance, where a caller is held in a shaky close-up and the dancers, also filmed

with shaky cameras, are awkwardly composed. The painterly images and control-ling editing are the work of a self-conscious artist who, with his highly proficientcameraman Michel Brault (who had worked as a cameraman for Jean Rouch onChronique d’un été [1960]), is exploring what the relatively new technology of lightweight cameras and sound gear can do. The aestheticizing of island life, alter-nating with the use of a very pared down documentary style (which looked espe-cially unusual in 1963) makes it clear that Perrault is not a pioneer of a pious,

we-seers-tell-the-truth type of vérité orthodoxy but is following a hybridized,semifictional Rouchian idea that filmmaking is a search for understanding.

Quinn’s Poitín also draws on an aesthetic that is very similar to Rouch’s, al-though, consistent with the ethnobiographers, Quinn attempts to portray the sub-

jectivity of distinct individuals. Brian Winston has written that “Rouch tested how the ‘real’ people with whom he was working might respond in some fictional set-tings. He wanted thereby to illuminate something otherwise not filmable—theirmental states.”23 The usually very traditional ethnographer Karl Heider oddly sees




this impulse as being at the heart of the ethnographic project: “The major strengthof the ethnographic film is its ability to focus on peak events of interpersonal rela-

tionships and so explore in detail the dynamics of emotions as they are played out.”24

Poitín, which features mostly nonprofessional actors performing activities very similar to those of daily existence, is all about the mental and emotional state of individual Gaeltacht dwellers. The two main characters (Niall Tóibín and DonalMcCann) are nominally employed by an old poitín maker (Cyril Cusack), but they also collect the dole and generally lead lives of bored troublemakers. Indeed, agreat deal of the film consists of slow portrayals of everyday life in Connemara.There is much less of a narrative drive than in The Bishop’s Story. In this way, Poitínis also closer to Pour la suite du monde, not only in its use of documentary aesthet-ics but in the way it is so driven by both narrative and nonnarrative impulses.

Overall, Poitín is much less about the doings of a couple of moonshine middle-men than about the roughness of life in Connemara. Consequently, the climax of the film, the most protracted and drawn-out sequence, occurs when the Niall Tóibín

character tries unsuccessfully to rape the distiller’s daughter, only to have her laughat him for his lack of sexual prowess. Shot in a series of awkwardly composed longtakes, the sequence feels rushed and unsteady but seems to go on forever. Ulti-mately, the scene contributes little to the narrative, yet it is much more strikingthan the sequence that brings the story to a head, when the distiller decides to takematters into his own hands and trick his henchmen into drowning themselves.That bit is more straightforward, emphasizing long shots, but is edited and ex-ecuted with relative efficiency. The rape sequence feels more important to thefilm overall, because it contributes, in a very visceral way, to the viewer’s under-standing of the inner lives of the characters and of how brutal and frustrating lifein Connemara can be.

The sequence in which the middlemen sell their ill-gotten poitín in the villagedraws on a semifictional, semidocumentary style that seems consistent with a

Rouchian aesthetic. Although clearly staged, the scene consists mostly of people do-ing what people do in a village square: chatting, standing around, bargaining overdonkeys. Shot in a way that departs from classical Hollywood norms (Quinn jumpsaround a lot, and he seems to want to be more impressionistic than narrative), thesequence does not really follow documentary norms either: the shots are fairly short,and the close-ups of money changing hands are clearly tagged as fictional.

The village square section of Poitín is reminiscent of the conclusion of Pour la suite du monde, when word gets out that the islanders have caught a beluga. Somebits are candid, such as when they get the beluga onto the boats, but other bits areobviously staged, even though the subjects do not act aware of the camera. Theseinclude the sequence in which a group of old men talk about how they are showingthe youngsters that they are still worth something. A truck drives up with GrandLouis in it, and Perrault cuts to him getting out and talking to the other old-timers;the arrival was clearly planned in advance and shot with several cameras. In asequence shortly thereafter, Alexis talks to his son Léopold about how he cannotgo to New York because he wants to vote Liberal one last time. We see Léopold

walk up to his father in a long shot, and there is a reverse shot as they sit down to




talk; the image is strikingly framed, against piles of drying peat, and although thetwo men are always fairly far from the camera, they are perfectly miked; the edit-

ing, then, and the sound, to say nothing of the composition of the shot, suggestthat significant preparation took place on the part of the filmmakers.Most interestingly, many sequences in Pour la suite du monde are somewhere

between prepared and candid, such as when Léopold is at his house calling QuébecCity. We can hear the voice at the other end of the phone, suggesting significantpreparation was necessary, and the scene is cut in a way that is rhythmic and fo-cused, even featuring eyeline matches; the phone conversation, however, appearsgenuine and important to the narrative. As in the market sequence and in otherscenes in Poitín, these situations in Pour la suite du monde are more or less fic-tional but simultaneously are also more or less representative of the people’s lives.

It is this aspect of Perrault’s work that caught the eye of Gilles Deleuze, who wrote quite a bit about Perrault in Cinema 2: L’Image-Temps. Deleuze could alsobe talking about Bob Quinn when he writes that

when Perrault criticizes all fiction, it is in the sense that it forms a model of preestab-lished truth, which necessarily expresses the dominant ideas or the point of view of thecolonizer, even when it is forged by the film’s author. . . . When Perrault is addressinghis real characters of Québec, it is not simply to eliminate fiction but to free it from themodel of truth, which penetrates it, and on the contrary to rediscover the pure andsimple storytelling function that is opposed to this model. . . . What cinema must graspis not the identity of a character, whether real or fictional, through his objective andsubjective aspects. It is the becoming of the real character when he himself starts to“make fiction,” when he enters into the “flagrant offence of making up legends” and socontributes to the invention of his people.25

The concept of storytelling is central to Deleuze’s schema of cinematic narra-tive. He writes later that “storytelling is not an impersonal myth, but neither is it a

personal fiction: it is in a word an act, a speech-act through which the charactercontinually crosses the boundary that separates his private business from politicsand that itself produces collective utterances.”26 What we see in both Quinn’s andPerrault’s films is precisely the production of such collective utterances, the pro-duction of a kind of autoethnography, since the filmmakers are part of, but alsooutside, the cultures they are documenting. Furthermore, they are documentingthese cultures for both internal and international viewerships. Russell sees a radi-cal consciousness at the heart of this kind of activity: “The oxymoronic label‘autoethnography’ announces a total breakdown of the colonialist precepts of eth-nography, and indeed the critical enthusiasm for its various forms situates it as akind of ideal form of antidocumentary.”27

What we also see is that island life is highly complex, always part of a series of negotiations with modernity and its arguable aesthetic companion, realist form.Deleuze finds Perrault interesting because he moves between the archaeology of minority discourse and the transformation of cinematic form, removing the truthimperative from documentary. Quinn does something similar; he tries to find notonly images but a cinematic strategy that will start to undo the history of




marginalization and condescension that defines the histories and representationsof the Gaeltacht.

Indeed, Heider, in writing about the English version of Pour la suite du monde,The Moontrap, could also be writing about The Bishop’s Story or Poitín when heasserts that “The Moontrap has the best of two worlds; it does record in detail aninteresting and unusual technological process of the past, . . . and it manages toshow how that technological process is embedded in its social context.”28 Heidercould have added that in Quinn’s films the documentation of that process is alsoembedded in an aesthetic process. In the case of Quinn and Perrault, it is impos-sible to discern whether their films are supposed to be about the small details of the cultures they document or about broader, sociocultural phenomena.

Dispersions. Although Quinn and Perrault have made careers of chronicling themost isolated regions of their respective nations, they have also documented theimpact of internationalism on these cultures. Some of their films deal with na-

tional origins, some with the idea and experience of diaspora, but in either casenational belonging is shown to be flexible, mobile, and internationalist. Globalismis based in uncertainty, not clarity and uniformity. Using hybridized, unconven-tional forms of documentary, Quinn and Perrault are trying to convince their view-ers of the tentative, malleable nature of nation.

Although films like Poitín and The Bishop’s Story had modest domestic distri-bution, Quinn is probably best known in Ireland for his three-part television se-ries, Atlantean, produced in 1983 for RTÉ, and for its sequel, Atlantean 2: Navigato(1997). In the 1983 series, Quinn focuses on the North African roots of the Irish,arguing that they are descended not from the Celts but from people in the Maghreb,

who share a common dependence on the Atlantic Ocean (the 1997 series focuseson Central and Eastern Europe). He traveled through Morocco, Tunisia, and Egyptand, of course, all over Ireland in search of evidence in support of this hypothesis,

whose tentative, uncertain nature he makes clear throughout the film. Atlantean is basically an educational documentary with a few important diver-

gences, chief among them being its departure from an objective, pedagogical form.The film opens with a ridiculous image: Quinn, a bearded Irishman, dancing awk-

wardly with an Egyptian man. While Atlantean uses many of the tropes of a Dis-covery Channel program (interviews with experts from museums and universities,sequences shot with animation cameras with maps showing possible migrationpatterns, etc.), it also features a montage sequence of landscapes and people asQuinn, in voice-over, tells us that he often thought that the whole idea for this filmseemed “eccentric” and “foolish.” At other times, he tells us how the Irish peopleare reluctant to conceive of the ideas espoused in the film in part because of their“colonized minds.” He finds especially important points of contact between Irishand Arabic (which he claims are closer than Irish and English); between tradi-tional sean-nós songs and traditional Arabic singing; and, most important for histheory about the Irish and the North Africans being seafaring peoples, betweenthe design of a two-piece sail found in both coastal North Africa and on the west-ern shore of Ireland, in particular in Connemara.




Regardless of the veracity of Quinn’s theory, Atlantean is worth discussinghere for the way it challenges the conventions of both scientific objectivity and

national belonging, showing both to be constructions. Indeed, the key to the Atlantean series can be found at the end of the book Quinn wrote as a companionto the series. He asserts:

As we find ourselves being fitted, modular-like, into a consumer world—be it as citizensof the U.S., the U.S.S.R., the EEC, or any other conglomeration—we are forced to lookdesperately for evidence of our uniqueness as persons and peoples. But this should notprevent us—indeed must encourage us—to admit at all times that every nation, big orsmall, is a concoction, an arbitrary mixture of cultures and races, each of whose con-stituent parts is indispensable to the overall flavor.29

This position—that nations are necessary and have some basis in physical reality atthe same time as they are also arbitrary and culturally mixed—echoes recent schol-arly work on the concept of nation (or arguably precedes it, since the book Atlantean

was published in 1986). I can hear Aijiz Ahmad in the discussion in Atlantean onnationalist revisionism:

One interrogates minority nationalisms, religious and linguistic and regional national-isms, transnational nationalisms (for example, Arab nationalism) neither by privilegingsome transhistorical right to statehood based on linguistic difference or territorial iden-tity, nor by denying, in the poststructuralist manner, the historical reality of the sedi-mentations which do in fact give particular collectivities of people real civilizationalidentities. Rather, one strives for a rationally argued understanding of social contentand historical projects for each particular nationalism.30

The need to recognize this balancing act—the reality of social content and theshifting historical projects that have created an Irish national self—is at the core of Atlantean. Quinn is seeking not so much to recover a “true” Irish nationality but todraw his viewer’s attention to the fact that “old” national ideas have been used for

political, sometimes colonizing, purposes. Quinn thus relies on the sedimentationsof shared material and cultural history, evinced by sail design, songs, and linguisticstructures, and while he is not calling the legitimacy of the Irish Republic into ques-tion, his film serves as an argument for why the state needs to better recognize thatreal Irish history is derived from an extraterritorial history—the reliance on theNorth Atlantic. Atlantean, like The Bishop’s Story and Poitín, is a very odd call fornationalist agitation: it calls the most basic parts of the national idea into questionnot to undermine the idea of nationality altogether but to achieve a more nuancedand open view of what Quinn clearly thinks is a very important concept.

This concept is also central to Perrault’s most formal and politically ambitiousfilm, Un pays sans bon sens! (1970). This dense, essayistic work follows severalpeople, including Maurice Chaillot, a young Franco-Albertan now living in Paris;Didier Dufour, a scientist who sees the behavior of lab mice as a metaphor forQuébec history; a group of lumberjacks and caribou hunters; a family of Huron wholive on Sept-Isles and find that there is very little wilderness where they can practicetheir traditional lifestyle; a group of Bretons struggling for greater autonomy inFrance who find the cause of Québec independence very interesting indeed; and




René Lévesque,31 who is making a tour through Manitoba to explain Québec sepa-ratism to English Canadians. The film is loosely held together by a voice-over and

title cards that divide it into three sections, “L’Appartenance à l’album,” “Le Refusde l’album,” and “Le Retour à l’album.”

Un pays sans bon sens! marks a significant break with the cinéma direct style of the Île-aux-Coudres trilogy. One sequence, which introduces us to the Franco-Albertan Maurice, features him complaining about stereotypes of backward, ruralFrench Canadians; this is cross-cut, retaining his voice-over, with images of life onl’Île-aux-Coudres, where life is clearly rustic. That sequence opens with LéopoldTremblay talking about how for him France is home, and if things ever got really bad he and his family could pick up and go to France. How to read this? Is Perraultmaking fun of Léopold’s naive view of France, since Maurice seems to think thatislanders would likely find life in Paris less than familiar? Is Perrault pointing outMaurice’s own insecurity about being French Canadian? This sequence shows ushow insecure Maurice is in his French identity: he recalls at one point how as a childhe was horribly embarrassed that his mother spoke French to him on the bus, andhe came to France hoping to reconnect with an identity that in western Canada he

was unable to express. We also see how almost embarrassingly enthusiastic aboutEuropean French culture Maurice is, as he waxes poetic about how everything here

Figure 4. Un pays sans bon sens! (Pierre Perrault, 1970) is a dense, essayistic filmfilled with rambling discussions, marking a significant break with the cinéma di-rect paradigm. Courtesy Cinémathèque Québécoise.




is charged with sex. Is Perrault making fun of both Maurice and Léopold? Is he inall seriousness exposing the painful contradictions of being a North American

Francophone? It is just not clear.Perrault seems to be using editing strategies in Un pays sans bon sens! tomove from a comparison of different kinds of frustration (not exactly a happy emo-tion but not a difficult one to evoke clearly) to images of frustration and fragmen-tation. Or to put it in a more optimistic and more comparative way: Perrault iscoming close here to the idea of nation as montage that permeates Atlantean. Thismove toward a montage idea is especially interesting given my argument thatPerrault and Quinn are following the modernist anthropological idea set out by George E. Marcus. Marcus thinks that montage is a useful metaphor for currenttrends in ethnography, arguing at one point that “anthropological representations,as claims to knowledge, now exist in a complex matrix of dialogic engagement withdiverse representations, interests, and claims to knowledge concerning the sameobjects of study.”32 The romantic quest for French ancestors, and for the clarity

that historical research of all kinds is supposed to bring, has failed. On with thecultural fragmentation and collision of the real world!Onward, in short, with what the Martiniquan novelist and critic Édouard

Glissant calls le divers, a condition that he argues is central to the condition of theCaribbean but also part of contemporary life all over the world (“Le monde secréolise,” he wrote in 199533). In Le discours antillais, he writes that

le divers, which is neither chaotic nor sterile, signifies the effort of the human spirittoward a crossing, without universal transcendence. Le divers needs the presence of peoples, no longer objects to sublimate but as a project to put into relationships. Youcan’t do as Trinidadians or Québécoises do if you aren’t Trinidadian or Québécois; butfrom now on it’s true that if Trinidad or Québec didn’t exist as composites accepting of le divers, something of the flesh of the world would be missing.34

Although neither Perrault nor Quinn has any interest in the Caribbean (judg-ing from their films, anyway, which make no reference to the region), what they are trying to evoke and argue about can be meaningfully understood through thelens of the Caribbean’s cultural condition. Chris Bongie has argued that this con-clusion is inescapable: “This foundational encounter makes it [the Caribbean] asite that has, from its very beginnings, borne witness to a relational way of life thatno one in the late-twentieth-century world of the ‘new global economy’ can now avoid confronting.”35 These filmmakers were confronting this global imperative inthe 1970s and 1980s, when American dominance was certainly familiar to all butglobalization as we know it today was as yet unnamed. Their films, in stressing theimportance and the fundamental complexity of their national myths in an interna-tional context, are offering both a preview of that condition and a solution to thehomogenizing and isolationist extremes that globalization has too often produced.

Glissant’s concept of le divers, with its focus on specificity and mixture, itsrejection of both universal transcendence and nationalist provincialism, intersectsnicely with what Quinn and Perrault are wrestling with in their work. All threeintellectuals are showing us that small islands, despite their apparent isolation and




the tendency toward essentialism that often defines the mainstream understand-ing of these areas (Glissant’s ideas fly directly in the face of concepts such as

négritude, in much the same way that Atlantean is an explicit rejoinder to a roman-tic “Celtitude” or Un pays sans bon sens! rejects a pure laine approach to Frenchidentity), can actually be the starting place for a complex, insurgent redefinition of the relationship between the local and the global.

Following Glissant’s ideas about créolisation, then, it seems clear that a tradi-tional concept of authenticity is no longer tenable (if it ever was). The failure of thisauthenticity has been the central subject of a lot of recent filmmaking that falls un-der the rubric of “hybrid cinema,” or what Laura U. Marks calls “intercultural cin-ema.” Marks hits the Perrault/Quinn nail right on the head when she writes that

cinematic archeology is not a question of exhuming the “authentic voice” of a minority people—for that would be a unitary voice and, in fact, it would simply replicate thetransparent domination by which a minority artist is forced to speak in a minority voice.The minority artist, by contrast, dances along the border. He/she must undo a doublecolonization, since the community is colonized both by the master’s stories and by itsown, that have been translated and annexed by the colonizer.36

Russell has a similar take on the possibilities of autoethnography, writing thatit “is a vehicle and a strategy for challenging imposed forms of identity and explor-ing the discursive possibilities of inauthentic subjectivitites.”37 Authenticity, soimportant to a traditional ethic of ethnographic fieldwork, is for both Quinn andPerrault a kind of Borgesian riddle: the deeper you move into the maze that issupposed to bring you there, the farther away from it you get.

The Things in Between. The definition of hybrid cinema is tricky, having been,for some while now, all things to all scholars and critics. Marks offers a workingdefinition in her book The Skin of the Film, although the enormous number of

films she covers in that book should give a good sense that the term is quite broad.Drawing on Homi Bhabba, she writes that

cultural hybridity, like the metaphor of genetic mutation from which it draws, is necessar-ily unpredictable and un-categorize-able. The hybrid reveals the process of exclusion by

which nations and fixed cultural identities are formed, forcing the dominant culture toexplain itself. . . . The term “hybrid cinema” also implies a hybrid form, mixing documen-tary, fiction, personal, and experimental genres, as well as different media.38

Quinn and Perrault, as a result of their need to explain remote experiencesand to bring those experiences into an international context, have adopted justsuch a hybrid form. We have already seen how they mix fiction and documentary.I shall now complete this portrait of Perrault and Quinn as hybrid filmmakers by explaining the ways they have revealed the process of exclusion by which nationsand fixed cultural identities are formed. For this I shall briefly discuss two filmsthat Quinn and Perrault made about diasporas of their respective nations, L’Acadie,l’Acadie?!? (1971) and Pobol í London/Flytippers (1987).

L’Acadie, l’Acadie?!? is the closest Perrault has come to making a “militant




film,” along the lines of films made in France, the U.K., and Latin America in the1960s and 1970s. Featuring opening titles and segment dividers consisting of news-

paper clippings—a device reminiscent of mid-period Godard—Perrault moves usright into the strife that was gripping the recently established Université de Monctonin New Brunswick in 1968. Students were agitating for greater linguistic consider-ation, not so much from the university, which they decry as being criminally underfunded, especially in comparison to the English-speaking University of New Brunswick, but from Moncton as a whole.

The film is filled with scenes of confrontations with bastions of the Anglophoneestablishment, filmed in a very cool, classically direct style. A sequence in whichstudents address the city council and are cowed by the extremely patronizing mayoris almost parodically direct. All we see throughout the entire fairly dramatic sceneis the students’ backs; the camera hardly moves. The sequence at a meeting of thelocal chapter of the Empire Loyalist Society feels much more militant; the stu-dents shut the meeting down and Perrault and Brault capture the confrontation

with the kind of unstable, mobile camerawork that reminds the viewer why cinémadirect was the preferred mode of many 1960s agitational filmmakers.Other parts of the film are much more calm, feeling closer to the cinéma de la

parole that we usually associate with Perrault. This is especially true of a sequencein which the students talk about how hard it is for Francophones in New Brunswick;they speak of Québec as though it were a promised land, where they could fully bethemselves if only they could move there. At the moment, it becomes clear thatthese students think of themselves as in a kind of Québec diaspora, excluded fromthe mainstream and gripped with feelings of nostalgia for a nearby nation with

which they have little lived experience (this is of course not true of the two stu-dents who are originally from Québec).

While not as brooding or obsessive about the nature of home and exile as mostof the films that Marks discusses as “hybrid cinema,” L’Acadie, l’Acadie?!? shares

a great deal with these works by virtue of its disjuncture of style and content andits concern with the ways that exile is written out of national experiences. The

juxtaposition of the near-fisticuffs at the Loyalist Society with the freewheelingconversation about Québec and cultural self-realization makes it clear how cen-tral, and yet how invisible, French speakers were and are in English Canada.

The diaspora that Bob Quinn evokes in Pobal í London / Flytippers is not aspoliticized as in L’Acadie, l’Acadie?!?, and Quinn makes much less of its role in theBritish national mosaic. Nonetheless, the men from Connemara, living in London,

who illegally dump construction waste on vacant lots occupy a similarly embattled, visible and yet invisible place in their nation, as they are exiled because of the eco-nomic underdevelopment of the Gaeltacht. A sequence in which two very stuffy English administrators talk about the threat to public safety posed by the illegaldumping is striking because of the air of mystery they give to the perpetrators of the crime; they truly know nothing about them. I do not wish to ascribe more politi-cal value to the illegal dumping of dirt than it deserves; what is notable in this filmis Quinn’s discovery, and his extremely close inspection, of a small, self-containedcommunity that still speaks a language that the government of the country these




men live in tried very hard to wipe out during the nineteenth century. As a micro-cosm of the postcolonial diaspora in the late 1980s, and of the Gaeltatcht itself (the

community comes to feel like a little island on the fringe of London), these Irish-speaking muck dumpers are striking.

Conclusion. What most immediately links Bob Quinn and Pierre Perrault is theircommon interest in explaining cultures that are too little understood by the na-tions to which they belong. But scratch a little deeper and the similarities betweenthese two filmmakers become almost uncanny. Both are frustrated by the bound-aries between fiction and documentary, seeing them as arbitrary and ignoring them

whenever they can. Both are nationalists, but both are passionately interested inthe international aspects of national myths and in where these myths break downaltogether. Both have attacked the project of building a nationalist, formally hy-bridized cinema by going beyond the borders of their nations. So, while they arepart of different cinematic generations and are working in very different formal

and institutional contexts, both filmmakers are part of a movement that embracesboth the global and the local. While their films need to be seen in their own his-torical, cultural, and political contexts, they are also an important part of an inter-nationalized hybrid cinema, a filmic practice that has come to be understood asuniquely organic to the cultural condition of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Notes

Bill Beard, Nasrin Rahimieh, Sharon Sherman, and Heather Zwicker all read earlier draftsof this essay; big thanks to each of them and to Cinema Journal’s anonymous readers. Thanksalso to Claudette Breton of the National Film Board of Canada’s Edmonton office; StephenO’Riordan, curator of film and video at the University of California, Davis, Library; andBob Quinn, for the loan of tapes.

1. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and theSenses (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), and Catherine Russell, Experi-

mental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 1998).

2. David MacDougall, “The Subjective Voice in Ethnographic Film,” in Leslie Devereauxand Roger Hillman, eds., Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropol-ogy, and Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 241.

3. Ibid., 242.4. Brault has told me that, for the most part, he directed Pour la suite du monde, which

was Perrault’s first experience with cinema except for a three-part TV series called Au pays du Neufve-France (1958–59), for which Perrault wrote the text. Brault also toldme that it was Perrault who knew the islanders ( Au pays du Neufve-France had beenabout l’Île-aux-Coudres) and who was responsible for setting up the contacts with them

and generally for getting the film under way, an important aspect of the project, espe-cially given its connection to Flaherty’s cinematic practice. This division of labor actu-ally seems quite natural. Brault also said that he was more interested in images, whilePerrault was more interested in la parole. Brault further explained that this was a fairly unique case in Perrault’s career and not the case at all with his other films, including




those they made together. Thus, considering Pour la suite du monde to be a “Perraultfilm” is something of an auteurist cheat.

5. Lance Pettitt, Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester, U.K.:Manchester University Press, 1999), 80.

6. Poitín, also known as poteen, is an illegal and incredibly strong liquor, brewed frompotatoes. Roughly speaking, it is the cultural and alcoholic equivalent of moonshine.

7. Brian McIlroy, World Cinema 4: Ireland (Trowbridge, U.K.: Flicks Books, 1988), 68.8. Gaeltachts are regions where Irish Gaelic is supposed to be the first language. These

areas are set aside by the government of the Republic of Ireland (there are no suchareas in Northern Ireland, where Irish Gaelic has very little official status), are moder-ately subsidized by the government, and often have small “Irish colleges.” The biggestGaeltacht is in the west of Ireland, in the region known as Connemara in County Galway,although there is also a significant Gaeltacht in County Donegal, in the northernmostpart of the republic. Only about 1 percent of the population of the Republic of Irelandspeak Irish Gaelic as their first language, although constitutionally it is the republic’sfirst language, in contrast to Canada’s official policy of recognizing both French and

English as the nation’s two equal languages.9. Cited in Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland (Syracuse,N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1988), 129.

10. Nuala C. Johnson, “Making Space: Gaeltacht Policy and the Politics of Identity,” inBrian Graham, ed., In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (New York: Routledge,1997), 185.

11. William Rothman, Documentary Film Classics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1997), 1.

12. Gilles Marsolais, L’Aventure du cinéma direct revisitée (The Direct Cinema AdventureRevisited) (Laval, Québec: Les 400 Coups, 1997), 107. Except for the Deleuze extract,all the translations in this essay are my own.

13. Phillipe Pilard, “Notes à propos du Flaherty Country et du Pays Perrault” (Notes Re-garding “Flaherty Country” and “Perrault Country”), in Paul Warren, ed., PierrePerrault: Cinéaste-Poète (Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1999), 156; emphasis added.

14. George Marcus, “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and theCinematic Metaphor of Montage,” in Devereaux and Hillman, Fields of Vision, 35–36.15. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 66.16. Russell, Experimental Ethnography, 219.17. Bob Quinn, “What Happened to the Bishop?” Film Ireland 39 (February–March

1994): 8.18. The Quiet Revolution was a period in Québec’s history when it was transformed from a

closed society tightly controlled by the Catholic Church and an Anglophone capitalistelite into a secular and open society. The era is generally considered to have begun in1959, when Québec’s repressive and virulently anti-Semitic prime minister, MauriceDuplessis, died in office, after three decades in power. It is generally considered to havepeaked during Expo 67, held in Montréal, when Québec’s transformation from a provin-cial into a cosmopolitan society seemed irreversible. The period is generally consideredto have ended in October 1970, when Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau declared

martial law in Québec and mobilized the Canadian Army to deal with the Front de Lib-eration du Québec (FLQ), which, after a sporadic bombing campaign, kidnapped andkilled labor minister Pierre Laporte. The War Measures Act, which Trudeau invoked,allowed for the rounding up and detention without charge of hundreds of people withtenuous or no connections to the FLQ. This period, known as the October Crisis, marks




the end of the idealism of the Quiet Revolution and the hardening of political opinionthroughout Québec that led to the eventual rise to power of the separatist Parti Québécois.

19. Reproduced in Michel Brûlé, Pierre Perrault, ou une cinéma national (Pierre Perrault,or a National Cinema) (Montréal: Les presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1971), 19.

20. Ibid.21. Jane Gaines, “Inventing and Preserving Appalachia: Appalshop Documentaries,” Jump

Cut 34 (March 1989): 56.22. Robert Daudelin, “Encounter between Fiction and the Direct Cinema,” in Piers Handling

and Pierre Vérroneau, eds., Self Portraits (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1980), 100.23. Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British

Film Institute, 1995), 182.24. Karl Heider, Ethnographic Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 27.25. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 150.26. Ibid., 222.27. Russell, Experimental Ethnography, 277.

28. Heider, Ethnographic Film, 60. Until very recently, there was no English-subtitled version of Pour la suite du monde available. In December 2000, the National FilmBoard of Canada finally released on video a subtitled version of the original entitled Of Whales, the Moon, and Men. Until then, the film had been circulated in an “English-language version” called The Moontrap, which was some thirty minutes shorter, andinstead of subtitles, it had a voice-over that translated some of the dialogue and pro-

vided a narration. These elements completely destroyed some of the most importantaspects of the cinéma direct aesthetic for which Perrault was so famous.

29. Bob Quinn, Atlantean: Ireland’s North African and Maritime History (London: Quar-tet Books, 1986), 177.

30. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 11.31. René Lévesque was one of the founders of Parti Québécois (PQ), which emerged in

1968 as the result of a merger of several separatist organizations. It controlled Québec’sprovincial government from 1976 to 1985, with Lévesque serving as premier for al-

most that entire time (he was forced to resign in 1985, right before an election wascalled in which the Québec Liberals were reelected). With Lévesque at its head, thePQ sponsored a referendum on sovereignty for Québec in 1980 (which it lost), and in1982 it nearly derailed the negotiations to patriate Canada’s constitution from the UnitedKingdom (the constitution was successfully patriated by then Canadian prime minis-ter Trudeau, although it has never been fully recognized by Québec). Lévesque diedshortly after he left politics.

32. Marcus, “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing,” 39.33. Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Introduction to a Poetics of

Diversity) (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 15.34. Édouard Glissant, Le discours anti llai s (Caribbean Discourse) (Paris: Gallimard,

1997), 327.35. Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 23.

36. Laura U. Marks, “A Deleuzian Politics of Hybrid Cinema,” Screen 35, no. 3 (fall1995): 262.37. Russell, Experimental Ethnography, 276.38. Marks, The Skin of the Film, 7–8.

Arguing With Ethnography_ the Films of Bob Quinn and Pierre Perrault - Jerry White

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