Documental y nación.com

A new way of inserting reality into documentaries. The wide-angle lens apparatus, as part of the relationship between the film and the viewer, make Les Raquetteurs (1958, by Michel Brault/Gilles Groulx) a good example of the direct before the direct cinema. The street, the ritual, the sense of belonging, the camera as a mediator, as a space to establish these constants that, from Canada, define a model and its variation: cinéma vécu, cinéma verité, «le cinéma d’ici». The public producer, Office National du Film (ONF)/Nation Film Board (NFB), since 1939 has established the framework for practices and authorship, out of which several periods have been constructed for documentaries acting as identity  operators. Thus, we first have to choose between a panoramic observation or an attempt to learn from a specific case, such as that of Quebec, how a country is represented in certain type of documentary (here cinéma verité) and how it has become an international label for Canadian film-making when contrived and made from reality. A fundamental film and author is Pour la Suite du Monde (1963, by Pierre Perrault), which was the first feature film from Quebec (or Canada). It was presented at the Cannes Festival and also describes the moment when politics spit into federal and national branches, and the incorporation of a new key idea giving shape to the dialectics between subjectivity and nation.