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Record W228805462

I'm Just a Simple Filmmaker: An Interview with Michel Brault

2007· article· en· W228805462 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Ayşegül Koç

Bibliographic record

VenueCineaction! · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCanadian Identity and History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFilmmakingArt historyFilm directorArtMovie theaterBeautyStudioWhite (mutation)HumanitiesVisual artsAesthetics
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In close-up, his head is tilted towards her. Hers is slightly tilted, too. He is looking at her. She is looking down. This frame, extracted from the rest of the twenty-three that make up a cinematic instance, is on the cover of a book in my hands, featuring the delicate beauty of Genevieve Bujold and Claude Gauthier caressing a strand of her hair in the snow. The book is a gift from Michel Brault given to me in a hotel suite where I conducted the following interview during the Toronto International Film Festival. The beautiful black and white image is unmistakably his own, from Entre la mer et l'eau douce (1967). Published by TIFF Group in 2007, Andre Loiselle's Cinema as History: Michel Brault and Modern Quebec explores the intricate embroidery of Michel Brault's filmmaking interwoven with Quebec's history. Loiselle rightly claims that to follow the career of Michel Brault as a director and cinematographer is to follow the history of modern Quebec. Sitting across from me, in the subdued light of a September afternoon, is the man behind some of the most unforgettable images I have seen in cinema, as director, Les ordres (1974), Pour la suite du monde (1963), l'Acadie, l'Acadie (1971) and as director of photography, Mon oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971), A tout prendre (Claude Jutra, 1961), Les Bons Debarras (Francis Mankiewicz, 1980), Mourir a tue-tete (Anne Claire Poirier, 1979), Chronique d'un ete (Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, 1961). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Aysegul Koc: I find the cinema of Quebec somehow patriarchal. Of course we see filmmakers like Anne Claire Poirer, Lea Pool, Louise Archambault but that is rare, whereas there seems to be a succession of male filmmakers, often with camaraderie amongst them or a father to son relationship between them. Michel Brault: I don't think so. Maybe it is because I could be considered one of those fathers (laughs). Cinematically I don't know if I have sons, it takes a couple of generations to say how that pattern works. It hasn't been that long that Quebec cinema exists. No, I don't believe so, Aysegul. (He gives a perfect rendition of my name, although he has just met me for the first time). AK: How would you explain the scarcity of women? MB: You find that there aren't many women in Quebecois cinema? AK: Yes. MB: I am not the person to ask, perhaps. I see much fewer films than before. I have not kept track of recent developments, new filmmakers. But just a little while ago I saw a beautiful film by Anais Barbeau. There is Catherine Martin. Do you know her? She has made many films. (Silence) Then, there is the mother of cinema Quebecois, perhaps Anne Claire Poirier? I should think so. AK: Where do you see the cinema of Quebec in the contemporary cinema of the world? MB: The cinema that we made in the 60s, when our cinema began to be really dynamic has in itself its tradition. You were saying that Quebec's cinema is patriarchal but let's say a director like Alanis Obomsawin makes her films with filmmakers who were in that tradition. All my life, when I was younger, my friends and I would watch all the good films we could get in the world. We'd even go to New York to see a film. But today it is impossible to follow the incredible flow of films made all around the globe. Our cinema of course suffers from that as well. I don't work in the industry anymore so it is hard to tell from the perspective of a filmmaker working now. AK: What about your production company, Nanouk Films? MB: No, not anymore. The company takes care of the films that I made already, but that is all. I am a little too old. I cannot work all day anymore. One has to be very alert when making a film. AK: How long has it been, that you quit filmmaking? MB: Slowly, I can say in the last three years. I've just made a film on poetry, three films of one minute each actually, that make part of an ensemble. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.696
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.036
GPT teacher head0.304
Teacher spread0.268 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2007
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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