The First Acadian Film: Visibility, Modernity, and Landscape in Les aboiteaux

Abstract

In 1955, on the bicentenary of the Acadian deportation, the National Film Board released Les aboiteaux, the first film with an original Acadian script and one that spoke volumes about the changing contours of Acadian identity in the postwar period. Directed by Léonard Forest, one of the many Acadian artists depicting their society's engagement with modernity, the film challenged the Acadian self-image of constituting a diasporic people. Instead, Les aboiteaux advanced a more territorial view of Acadian identity, grounded in places such as southeastern New Brunswick where the film takes place. Here Acadians were still living on a landscape created by their pre-deportation forebears through the construction of a system of dykes, known as aboiteaux, which drained the marshlands and allowed the people to settle along the rivers that flowed into the Bay of Fundy. By the 1940s, economic circumstances had led to the decay of the aboiteaux, and so Forest's film, using local actors to give it a documentary feel, describes one Acadian community trying to preserve the ancestral landscape. It shows modern techniques, introduced by the federal Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration, which were able to coexist with more traditional ways, suggesting a bright future for Acadians in a territory they could call their own.