Pierre Falardeau and Michel Brault, the FLQ and the Patriotes: Hollywood vs. Modernism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When I teach Quebec cinema, I often find myself joking that Pierre Falar deau is like the evil twin of Michel Brault. I am of course being facetious, but I am not being misleading. The connection between these two film makers is positively eerie, but it is also striking how radically different their takes on the same historical periods are. It would be easy to reduce these differences to a simple case of Brault being the older, wiser artist and Falar deau being the younger, more passionate and more naive upstart. It would also be easy to reduce this to a simple case of Brault being a compromised liberal, safely ensconced in the cocoon of the Quebec film community since his days at the 1950s Office National du Film (ONF), while Falardeau is a radical, independent, Third-Cinema style poUtical filmmaker. But both of these reductions are quite unsatisfying. Instead, I believe that the distinction between Brault and Falardeau is one of modernism vs. classicism, respectively. This is especially ironic not only because of Falardeau's roots in grassroots video (he spent time at Mon treal's Videographe) and fiery pamphlet films (such as Le Temps des bouffons [1985/1993], a denunciation of the Montreal Beaver Club) but also because of the way in which Falardeau tries to present himself. That he tries to pre sent himself as a dissident filmmaker is, of course, deeply deceptive; he is in fact much closer to Hollywood than to any tradition of international polit ical filmmaking. This is surely visible in Octobre or 15 fevrier 1839, and a full discussion of that Hollywood influence will follow. But despite the Videographe connection or films like Le Temps de bouffons, this is not at all excep tional; other Falardeau films like Le Party or the Elvis Gratton series are very much influenced by Hollywood forms (melodrama and slapstick comedy, respectively). Using the work of Fokkema and Ibsch cited above, I would argue that Brault is always critical and often conflicted in terms of politics and ide ology; Falardeau, on the other hand, seems far more interested in creating
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".