Directed by Suzette Lagacé
Produced by François Savoie and Suzette Lagacé
MOZUS Productions/Connections Productions
60 minutes • 2006
Available on DVD and VHS
I found this video for the trailer of Suzette Lagacé's 2006 documentary at
http://www.ipexview.com/solution/videos/H_Gagnon_Distribution/Illumination_Po...
The film is being marketed in the original French, and in English, by Moving Images:
http://www.movingimages.ca/catalogue/French/audelaapparences.html
http://www.movingimages.ca/catalogue/Art/marieclaireblais.html
Marie-Claire Blais is a writer about whom it is impossible to say enough (though it is certainly possible to say too many stupid things about her.) Her first novel, "La belle bête," was published in 1959, when she was barely 20 years of age, and it is still one of the most provocative peices of writing ever produced in Canada (note well: by a young woman from Québec.)
In 2005, "Augustino et le choeur de la destruction" was published, bringing to a close the trilogy begun in 1995 with "Soifs" and continued in 2001 with "Dans la foudre et la lumière." The critic Jacques Allard, in Le Devoir, compares the three novels to Dante's "Divine Comedy." I do not think that he is exaggerating.
For me, encountering "Les nuitsde l'Underground" first in English translation, and then in French, Marie-Claire's rivetting novel of lesbian life and sensibility in Montréal, and then "Le sourd dans la ville," where the avant-garde nature of her writing is for the first time fully expressed, were earth-shaking events.
Unfortunately, non-Canadians, and those anglophone Canadians who disregard anything written in French, will have no idea what a stellar group Suzette Lagacé has assembled here, in her documentary, to pay tribute to Marie-Claire, and to try to express their sense of Marie-Claire Blais's importance as a writer and as a social visionary, with the exception of Margaret Atwood, perhaps. For those who know Atwood, Marie-Claire is every bit as revolutionary in vision ("content"), whether one judges as a humanist, as a feminist, or as a GLBLT activist. Unlike Atwood, who in terms of technique, is still working with the novel as Dickens knew it, or created it, Blais is, as one of the commentators in this documentary says, avant-garde among the avant-garde, not in a frivolous or fashionable sense, but in a way similar to the vast new linguistic horizons forced upon the novel by the Marcel Proust's "Rememberance of Things Past" or Virginia Woolf's "The Waves" . Not just in the matter, of her writng, but in the manner, Marie-Claire Blais is one of the great innovators (and classicists!) of our time.
Paradoxically, perhaps, she is also one of most "big-hearted" writers of our generation, a "compassionate" writer. From the very beginning, in her work, one is aware of "un sentiment d'une vaste innocence répandue sur lhumanité, et que ce fut, parfois, une humanité sainte et héröique plongée en enfer." The sense of a noble and heroic human innocence buried in hell, though Blais certainly recognizes that we have for the most part created that hell ourselves, through war, poverty, religion, nationalsim, prejudice of all kinds.
An extraordinary woman, an extraordinary writer.
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Entrevue de Josée Dupuis avec Marie-Claire Blaisby SalonDuLivredeMtl446 views
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