Pierre Jutras worked at the Cinémathèque québécoise for 33 years, first as curator of Quebec and Canadian cinema, then as director of programming. He recently passed away, and to honor his memory, we were fortunate enough to prepare a carte blanche with him, reflecting on his highlights as a programmer and film-lover (the rediscovery of Jean Epstein and Ivan the Terrible, the revelation of Wang Bing and the extraordinary retrospective devoted to Manoel de Oliveira...).
« La Nouvelle Vague se fait donner une leçon de cinéma et de décolonisation. » – Pierre Jutras
September 1962. Hélène lives in Boulogne-sur-Mer with her son-in-law Bernard, who has just returned from Algeria. Her childhood sweetheart Alphonse, accompanied by his niece Françoise, comes to visit. The past turns the present upside down in this masterpiece by Resnais, a striking reflection on memory and the passage of time.
Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Night and Fog (1956), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. Resnais began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. These films were contemporary with, and associated with, the French New Wave (la Nouvelle Vague), though Resnais did not regard himself as being fully part of that movement.
Pierre Jutras
Born in 1945 in Saint-Marcel-de-Richelieu, Pierre Jutras studied filmmaking at the Institut des arts de diffusion in Brussels in the 1970s, where he was introduced to documentary, fiction and experimental cinema. In 1978, he was hired by the Cinémathèque québécoise as Head of Quebec and Canadian Cinema and co-director of the Copie Zéro from 1979 to 1988. He was also behind the first restoration of the film Kamouraska, by Claude Jutra. In 1997, he became Director of Conversation and Programming at the Cinémathèque, a position he held until his retirement in 2011. Parallel to his professional activities, he directed Lamento pour un homme de lettres in 1988 and Petites chroniques cannibales 1 in 1997, the first segment of a trilogy that was never completed. He died in Montreal on June 22, 2023.
