Clandestine Truth: The Canadian New Wave

Clandestine Truth: The Canadian New Wave

APRIL 3-25, 2007

Sponsored by Canadian Studies Center
Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
and the Canadian Consulate

CLANDESTINE TRUTH captures the mood of an era when feelings counted more than reason. In the 1960s, most national cinemas were undergoing major transformations. It was an era of rebellion and questioning of identity. Many great European films were created in this era, including THE 400 BLOWS, BREATHLESS, and LA DOLCE VITA. Closer to home, Canadian filmmakers, inspired by many of these classics, created their own distinctive, innovative films. Their work, with its focus on a distinctly contemporary mood, life, and conditions, represented a sharp departure from the country’s rich cinematic history of documentary filmmaking. CLANDESTINE TRUTH provides an overview of four rarely seen films by filmmakers who defined modern Canadian cinema. Originally intended as a documentary but transformed into a feature-length narratives, Gilles Groulx’ LE CHAT DANS LE SAC and Don Owen’s NOBODY WAVED GOODBYE both feature disaffected youth, one in Anglophone and the other in Francophone Canada. These works are juxtaposed with two independently financed films: Michel Brault’s ENTRE LA MER ET L’EAU DOUCE and seminal documentary filmmaker Allan King’s A MARRIED COUPLE. All four films stand as landmarks in the creation of Canada’s contemporary national cinema.


 

A Married Couple

Apr 24 - Apr 25, 2007

(Allan King, Canada, 1969, DV-CAM, 96 min.)

Exploring the emotional devastation of a modern marriage in conflict, this extraordinary and controversial documentary was first released in 1969. The film presents the lives of Billy Edwards, an upwardly mobile advertising copywriter, his wife Antoinette, who craves individuality and fame and their three-year-old son Bogart. By turn exquisitely painful and hilariously funny, this uniquely intimate portrait reveals the deep sense of loneliness at the heart of the couple’s relationship as well as the daily power struggles between them. The film delicately balances fiction and direct cinema and raises basic aesthetic issues about both. In fact, King calls it an "actuality drama"— not a bad term given the skill with which King records Billy and Antoinette’s dramatic flair.

 

“Quite simply one of the greatest movies I have ever seen” Clive Barnes, NEW YORK TIMES 
 

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Entre La Mer Et L'eau Douce

Apr 17 - Apr 18, 2007

(Michel Brault, Canada, 1967, 35mm, 85 min.)

During the late 1960s, Montreal underwent a transformation from a provincial capital to a vibrant urban center that became a magnet for Quebec youth. Michel Brault’s (cinematographer for Jean Rouch) ENTRE LA MER ET L’EAU DOUCE (BETWEEN SWEET AND SALT WATER) brilliantly captures this distinct moment with a simple story of a young musician who leaves his North Shore fishing village for the city. Once there he experiences the everyday poetry of late-night coffee bars, early-morning conversations with new friends and devastating love for a waitress played by an incandescent Genevieve Bujold. A low-key take on BREATHLESS—with echoes of the scandalous Swedish film I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW)—Brault’s work is a meandering snapshot of Montreal as it existed in 1967. 
In French with English subtitles.


“ENTRE LA MER ET L’EAU DOUCE is, to my mind, one of the unqualified masterpieces of Quebec cinema. It deserves to be seen as one of the finest works ever produced in this country.” Piers Handling, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 

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Nobody Waved Goodbye

Apr 10 - Apr 11, 2007

(Don Owen, Canada, 1964, 35mm, 80 min.)

Young filmmaker Don Owen's assignment from the National Film Board of Canada was to make a half-hour docudrama on juvenile delinquency. On the sly, he turned the project into a feature that helped launch modern Anglo-Canadian cinema. Peter Kastner is Peter, a middle-class suburban Toronto teenager whose youthful rebellion against adult values lands him in trouble at home, at school and with the law. Julie Biggs is Julie, his likeminded girlfriend. Owen's rough and ready film, shot with a lightweight, hand-held camera, had a fresh, improvised, intimate feel and a documentary-like immediacy that charmed audiences.

 

“A remarkable film you should not miss!” NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE 

“A marvelous movie! A story commensurate with THE CATCHER IN THE RYE!" NEW YORKER MAGAZINE 

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Le Chat Dans Le Sac

Apr 03 - Apr 04, 2007

(Gilles Groulx, Canada, 1964, BetaSP, 74 min.)

Seminal to the development of Quebecois and Canadian cinema, LE CHAT DANS LE SAC is seldom seen outside Quebec. The film recounts the problematic romance between intellectual journalist Claude and his Anglo-Jewish actress girlfriend, Barbara. Combining Brechtian techniques via Godard and a quasi-documentary feel, LE CHAT is visually beautiful, intellectually incisive and probing. Not only does the film clarify the relationship between the emerging Qu̩b̩cois cinema of the early Sixties and the French New Wave, but it also pre-figures many of the debates that would consume Quebecois intellectuals for the coming decades, presenting them in an irresistibly innovative framework. No wonder LE CHAT is revered by younger Quebecois filmmakers and everyone else who's ever seen it. With a score by John Coltrane. 
In French with English subtitles.


"Essential...as important to le Qu̩b̩cois as its contemporary NOBODY WAVED GOODBYE was to English-Canadian filmmakers." —TAKE ONE 

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