Le « troisième cinéma » au Québec : effervescence et lignes de faille

Abstract

The Rencontres internationales pour un nouveau cinéma sought to create a federation at the international level, by way of ensuring “an essential dialogue” and to “stimulate and make coherent [the] strategies” of everyone in both the North and the South who adhered to “Third Cinema,” under the patronage of Fernando Solanas. But this “community” was in fact quite fragile, and brought to the fore the divergences in viewpoints, practices and objectives which had so animated the milieu of Quebec cinema. Beginning with Guy Hennebelle, the ideological strife of this period has already been widely discussed, but our objective in this article is to identify the fault-lines that affected the different ways of understanding “audiovisual mediation” in the face of the “social change” such mediation referred to. We insist particularly on the uncertainty that defines notions of “public” and “collective,” as well as the role played by the introduction of video in documentary circles. We also take account in this portrait of Quebec cinema’s structural configuration, a milieu that allowed for the existence—despite these divergences—of a pluralist political cinema that was the period’s most activist, inventive and inspiring.