A forgotten film

Between 1974 and 1978, Jacques Leduc and several close collaborators made "seven-plus-one" documentaries for a series that defied current thinking, using direct techniques to find components in everyday life that, reassembled, could be turned into fiction. The series describes events in the life of a big city, day by day for one week.

In Leduc's words, they began with the desire "to archive the present in the hope that, with time, the dramaturgy of direct cinema could really develop, without anything being added from the outside; and that the emotion, humour and complexity of the characters and their reality would remain absolutely clear."

In the Dictionnaire du cinéma québécois, Euvrard and Coulombe describe the series: "Seemingly without meaning to, without noticeable premeditation, Leduc makes films that are about seeing how people really live, and living it with them. He shows what they accept, and follows them in their acceptance, and at the same time rebels against it. (...) He goes as far as possible in the direction of impressionist cinema, close to the "slice of life" and commercially unviable."

Might this "unviability" explain, at least in part, the "concerted" oblivion to which Chronique de la vie quotidienne has been assigned?

Because Chronique, a unique collective experiment in Quebec film history (if we leave out the making of À St-Henri le 5 septembre (September Five at Saint-Henri), spurred on by Hubert Aquin in 1962), seems to have faded from memory like many other of our films. We sometimes have the impression in Quebec that our film history begins with the latest box-office hit! In the land of Je me souviens, as René Lévesque put it, "Give me a minute to remember!" (A.P.)

Chronique de la vie quotidienne will run at three Special Screenings, and will be featured at a workshop moderated by Denys Desjardins, with Jacques Leduc and some of the craftspeople who worked on the film in attendance.