<i>Philosopher à travers le cinéma québécois: Xavier Dolan, Denis Côté, Stéphane Lafleur et autres cinéastes</i> . Par <scp>Pierre</scp> - <scp>Alexandre Fradet</scp> <i>Philosopher à travers le cinéma québécois: Xavier Dolan, Denis Côté, Stéphane Lafleur et autres cinéastes</i> . Par FradetPierre-Alexandre. Paris: Hermann, 2018. 270 pp.

This work can be situated at the convergence of two trends: the growing importance of ‘film-philosophy’ in the film studies discipline, in which cinema is to be seen as an expression of and vehicle for philosophical ideas (as opposed to ‘film theory’, which conceptualizes the cinematic apparatus and meaning-making); and the so-called renouveau of Quebec cinema, which, following on from commercial critical successes in the 2000s, is currently embodied by a new generation of directors, the most visible of whom is of course Xavier Dolan. Pierre-Alexandre Fradet’s five chapters summon principally — but not exclusively — Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Stanley Cavell to a discussion — not, surprisingly, of time and movement — but of ‘le sens commun’, not to be seen as ‘un contenu de croyances vulgaires’ (p. 21), but as a set of philosophical issues concerning le réel, the common ground of perceptions and beliefs. Fradet takes on board the massive heritage of Canadian direct cinema and documentary realism within Quebec’s film aesthetic, but does so in order to favour ‘l’ordinaire’ over ‘le quotidien’. Whereas the latter refers to, and films associated with it represent, ‘la routine’ of particular, identifiable individuals situated in the world, the former designates ‘une structure communément partagée’ (p. 44), which, as Fradet makes clear in strong passages on the work of Denis Côté, is also about imagination and potentiality, ‘l’espace de malléabilité qui nous environne […] la part de possible qui s’immisce toujours déjà dans le monde’ (p. 89). Fradet’s central conceptual preoccupation, and the Canadian/Quebec context, lead him to return on more than one occasion to debates, well worn since the direct cinema of the early 1960s, concerning the relation between the recording photographic apparatus’ immediate grasp of reality and the mediating work of the director and that very technology. The caricatural poles of these debates, and cinematic practices, are here termed ‘réalisme naïf’ and ‘médiationisme’, but Fradet proposes that cinema, in its relation to ‘l’ordinaire’, can instead make of its artistic and formal ‘intermédiaires’ a ‘bridge’ to reality rather than a ‘screen’ occluding it. On Xavier Dolan, Fradet engages more with the Quebec cultural context, as the wunderkind’s ‘cinéma sensoriel’ is seen to surpass a mere ‘phenomenology of the body’ in favour of the creation of an ‘espace commun’ through language and shared musical and other references (p. 178). It is in this chapter that the book comes closest to a more precise contextualizing of Quebec film creation, but it never uses its philosophical enquiry as a basis of more political probing (questions could be asked, for example, of the very white portrayal of the banlieue in the discussion of Stéphane Lafleur’s films). Certain passages (pp. 59, 185, 191) cry out for an engagement with Jacques Rancière’s writings on aesthetics and cinema, opsis and muthos, but he remains absent from the debate. While, inevitably, it is possible to quibble with certain arguments or emphases, this is nevertheless a rich work which deserves to be read and engaged with by all interested in francophone cinema and philosophy.

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