Claiming a Style: The "Living Cinema" of Pierre Perrault's Pour la suite du monde

Abstract

ing the images in a flurry of shoulders and faces. Accordion music and stamping feet, strangely distant in tone, play beneath this sequence, which nevertheless seems to synchronize by the time the camera focuses on a woman’s dancing feet as she hops onto an overturned boat. Suddenly, the woman leaps from her perch, and, in a punctual use of match-on action, the image track completes her fall in the form of a small girl landing in a meadow full of flowers and running to frolic with a group of other children. Simultaneously, the soundtrack cuts from the festive accordion to a rather rustic lilt played on a flute. The flute theme, which returns as a motif throughout the film, is resolutely nondiegetic and seems to be motivated only by the innocent play of the children in contrast with the image-anchored, dancing sounds of the beach party. The viewer is thus left in a lurch between two image-sound relations—one anchored in the indexical “real,” the other floating like a pastoral epiphany—that nevertheless derive from the similar hand-held camera techniques. Perrault’s restaging technique interacts fruitfully with his sound editing in another scene that both accounts and recounts a legendary mid-Lent festival. Joachim tells us in voice-over about the special day before the harvest when all the young men of the village dress in women’s clothing with masks, then travel around from house to house rousing the community. The story he tells us is a mixture of memories—his own participation in the event as well as other stories told to him by the elder Abel Harvey. Joachim tells of one memory that involves a strange goat playing with a child at one of the houses Figure 5. Michel Brault takes advantage of his lightweight camera. Photograph from the production of Pour la suite du monde. Directed by Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault. Produced by Fernand Dansereau. ©1962 National Film Board of Canada.