8 - Myths and Collective Memory

by Stephanie, Andrew, and Hugo

      This week, our team was assigned the documentaries Pour la suite du monde and Les voitures d'eau. They share the culture of the residents of Îles aux Coudres in the 1960's. These films definitely make us realize how culture is a part of us and keeping it alive is very important.

Pour la suite du monde

      Pour la suite du monde, a 105-minute Canadian documentary film, was created in 1963 by Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault. They followed residents of Île aux Coudres, an island in the Saint Lawrence River, as they were trying to revive an ancient tradition of their people: the whale hunt. This documentary followed the citizens for a whole year which helps us understand not only the complexity of whale hunting, but how they live.

Bringing back whale hunting was not an easy process. Some older residents were against it because they didn't think that the young ones had enough passion. Passion was a must for this process because it's extremely tiring and long. However, the main reason they decided to bring it back was so that the children would experience a whale hunt, thus keeping the tradition alive.

      The documentary is a real inside on the way of life and society in the 1960's. We get to see how they rely on their faith to help them through life and how the church plays a huge role in the development of their society. For example, when they had an announcement to make to the community, they would make it on the front step of the church after the Sunday service to make sure everyone got the message (In those days everyone went to church on Sundays). Also, the priest did a blessing of the whale hunt to hopefully get a good catch. In addition, we see Grand Louis, one of the older residents, get the Easter water for his family and explaining to them its religious significance.

      Back then, they didn’t have our new, modern entertainments systems-tv, video games, Facebook- and had to entertain themselves very differently than what we know. The kids were very inventive when it came to games, they would carve different toys out of wood. Every toy they owned was one they had made. The older people liked to dance. Their dancing style resemble Irish dancing and Scottish jigs. This is also a part of their heritage.

      The people of Îles aux Coudres still use this film to remember how their ancestors lived. For the 50 year anniversary of the documentary, they had a huge celebration. You can read more about it in the following link:
 http://voir.ca/chroniques/cinemaniaque/2012/08/22/pour-la-suite-du-monde-50-ans-plus-tard/  (It's in French, but still very interesting).

Myths and Collective memory

      Pour la suite du monde is all about the collective memory of Île aux Coudres. How do we learn about that island? We listen to what the residents have to say. This kind of documentary can be defined as Cinéma de la parole (speech cinema) which highlights the links between what the people in the documentary are saying and what the images shown in the documentary are sharing. Speech is a key component to this film. The people from this island speak with a very thick accent. This documentary was a way to record it; due to the easy access to mainstream radio or television, their unique accent is quickly fading. Their accent also brings authenticity to the film because the viewer actually gets to listen to the way the Islanders express themselves.

Les voitures d'eau

      Les voitures d'eau is a black and white documentary film--shot and originally released in 1969--that was directed by Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault. In total, the film is nearly 2 hours long; 110 minutes. The film is the third instalment in a trilogy of films (the first film of the trilogy was Pour la suite du monde) where the film creators follow residents of Île aux Coudres, an island in the St. Lawrence River, Quebec, Canada about 6 kilometres from the mainland, in an attempt to document their lives. In the first film, the Tremblay family and their friends use their ancestors old techniques to conduct a cross-island whale hunt. Similarly, in Les voitures d’eau, the Tremblay family and friends in the community build a beautiful wooden schooner (or goélette). At the same time as filming the Tremblay family, Perrault records various social and financial issues encountered by the villagers in their daily lives--more specifically; a dockers’ strike. With new, recent developments of iron-made boats, the demand for wooden boats is decreasing and this creates problems for the builders and navigators of wooden boats living on the island. Before winter, the builders are shown doing repairs and maintenance on the schooners. During the film, Eloi Perron builds a canoe for Leopard Tremblay after initially making a plan, and the entire construction process is recorded by the camera. Eventually, the ending of the season is marked with the burning of an old schooner after it had made it's last trip.

      The third film is shot by Brault and Perrault in the same direct shooting style of the first film and retains the emphasis on the strong French accent. For example, if one of the Islanders was walking, the cameraman follows him and walks with him. If the equipment was too heavyweight, the possibilities of recording would have been more limited.  According to recent studies, the population numbers for l’Île aux Coudres are quickly dropping at a steady rate for the last 80 years. In today’s society, it’s nearly impossible for one small group to be isolated as everyone is so closely linked with mainstream television and radio. Therefore, the thick accent of the islanders is quickly fading and with this documentary, it can stay alive forever. Pierre Perrault himself said his trilogy were “cinéma de la parole” (speech cinema), hinting that the speech itself and what people have to say in the film is nearly as important to the viewer as the actual images. 

      Similarly to the first film, the camera crew uses lightweight camera equipment, which allows for easy continuous movement and expanded opportunity. The filmmakers also stayed out of the way completely from the Islanders, not wanting to intrude on what they were recording. For example, during the construction process of the canoe in the workshop, the camera crew is able to easily move around while not getting in the way of the builders--everything is captured on film with little intrusion into the lives of the Islanders. A second example of the avantages of an small, unobtrusive camera crew is the ability of the camera crew to film off a small boat; with 5 minutes left in the film, the camera crew is in a small boat with a sail and records two other boats--with a larger crew, this never would have been possible. Les Voitures D’eau was an Observatory Documentary film, with a direct cinema shooting style and small unobtrusive crews. A unique characteristic of the film is the acknowledgement of the filmmaker, characterizing the film as an authentic, yet “cinematic” reality and distancing the characters from the filmmakers. There is also an absolute absence of music (no diegetic nor non-diegetic use of music) and a poetic use of editing.

      While the first film was focused on documenting the revival of the dying tradition of whale hunting, the third film focused more on exploring the social and financial issues and private lives of a community of people that stay outside the general framework of the rest of Canada. For example, towards the beginning of the film, the Tremblay family speaks of how some new boats are now being made from iron and no longer wood and how this eliminated certain jobs for some of the residents (such as the maintenance of the wood). In the year 2000, the Municipality of La Baleine merged back with the Île aux Coudres due to dropping population numbers. With the population numbers dropping every year, the culture, heritage, way of life and unique accent of the Islanders will soon be disappearing--and with this trilogy of films, Brault and Perrault have done a fantastic job of capturing the life of the Islanders so that it will never be forgotten or erased. The third film focused on the gradual disappearance of wooden schoners on the Îles aux Coudres due to faster, cheaper and more sophisticated iron boats and the problems this creates for residents. The film takes a political turn when Perrault and Gosselin pose the fundamental question regarding the survival of a people and its economic integration in the new social and cultural reality of francophone Quebec at that time. The documentary ends on a sad note and an uncertain future looms on the horizon for the inhabitants of the small island on the north coast.

To watch Les Voitures d'eau, please follow this link:
http://www.onf.ca/film/voitures_deau

The culture and the heritage of the Îles aux Coudres

      These films touched upon an extremely important topic; the culture and the heritage of Îles aux Coudres. Especially living in Quebec, who we are means a lot; even today we continue to struggle to keep our culture. Within both films we can see a proud people trying to revive their lifestyle that is slowly becoming extinct due to technological progress. Even with these advancements threatening their way of life, they continue to pursue their lifestyles and keep their ancestors’ ways alive.

      Whaling was a tradition, a way of life, of the past inhabitants, in Pour la Suite du Monde, who lived on Ile-aux-Coudres. Even with changing times, the current citizens decided to revive the spirit of the hunt, to begin whale trapping again. However, the reason they decided to do so was because people wanted to do a documentary about it. We don't think that the citizens of the island had realized that they were slowly losing their heritage. After this, they really wanted to make sure to keep their heritage. The majority of the able-bodied men partook in this quest to relive their pasts. Even during the rough patches they pulled through, all to keep their heritage alive, even today, we do the same. Heritage means something to all of us; it defines who we are, where we came from, what we went through to be where we are today. Just like the proud people of Île aux Coudres, we too fight for our heritage. In Quebec specifically, we work to keep the French language alive, just like they worked to keep whaling alive for the generations to come. In Quebec and in Canada, we definitely feel the influence of the United-States. We think that by knowing this it will allow our country and our province to make sure to keep our culture and our heritage alive.

      Les voitures d’eau also reveals another element of the heritage of Îles aux Coudres. different way of life, still with its own unique background. They continue to use hand-crafted wooden boats, but with time they soon realize that technology is making their lifestyle obsolete, destroying their heritage. Just like their group, there are many things that threaten to severe us from our heritage. Changing times and advancing technology has made family time less “valuable” in the eyes of today’s society when it used to be a huge part of who we are and how we learnt about the world. Just like the wooden boats, these small details of our lifestyle are slowly becoming obsolete as well.

       Our society is a very fast past one where money is very important. Because of this, we feel like people don't take enough time to continue on with traditions from their families and from their culture. In fact, religion is often abandoned because people don't make the time to participate in it. Everyone seems to be aware of this problem, but no one want to do anything about it.  

      With the immigration in Canada, there has been a lot of mixing of culture which is a blessing and a curse. More people get to know about different cultures however people seem to pick up only certain elements from each one. For example, when one parent is French and the other English and the child is raised in the west island, in most cases the child will not have French as a mother tongue.

      To conclude, Pour la suite du monde and Les voitures d'eau are two documentaries that are in fact a way to preserve the culture of Îles aux Coudres for generations to come. They used collective memory of the older residents to whale hunt and to built the boats, without them these projects would have been nearly impossible. They are both very goop examples of Cinéma de la parole because the people of the island are the ones telling the story which really adds some credibility to the films.  We feel that these documentaries have a hidden message; they are telling us to keep our cultures alive and authentic. We hope this will motivate everyone to go back and learn about your family's past because our culture is part of who we are and can definitely impact the way we live our life. If you are not convinced, we found a very interesting article that explains the importance of culture and keeping it alive:
      http://www.preservearticles.com/201101173456/important-functions-of-culture.html