The next province to join the ranks of government film studios was Quebec. Instead of establishing its own agency, the provincial government conducted their film operations through its Ministry of Agriculture. The films produced here focussed on education as their social improvement mandate. The film division operated in this manner for twenty-one years until Quebec established Le Service de Ciné-Photographie in 1941 to handle all fiction and non-fiction film production made by the province and its citizens (Elder, 98).
Launching the provincial government’s foray into documentary film production, distribution and exhibition was Joseph Morin, a civil servant with the Ministry of Agriculture, who, “as early as 1920 had the idea of using film for pedagogical ends” (“Cinema in Quebec”).
Morin carted around four documentary films to the farmers of rural Quebec, foreshadowing the habitual practice of the National Film Board of Canada years later. He often brought his own
generator as well to ensure that power was available for operating his projector in areas not yet serviced with electricity. (“Cinema in Quebec”)
Using his films for the purpose of educational outreach, Morin found great success with this new medium, prompting the importation of other documentary films from the United States and France. His film archive was the first in Canada and served as a model for other government departments (“Cinema in Quebec”). This provided the
government in Canada with a more powerful resource in its future propaganda campaigns by having access to a wide selection of international content to support their own messaging to the Canadian public.
Unlike the other provinces in Canada with film offices at the time, the Catholic Church in Quebec was not a fan of film.
In 1916, the L’Action Catholique newspaper began an
investigation into Quebec cinemas in an attempt to fight films they claimed promoted “debauchery and scandal” (“Cinema and
Institutions”). Throughout the province, “priests and bishops declared cinema the cause of all evils and the main enemy of French-Canadian identity” (“Cinema and Institutions”). As a result, many of the educational films made in Quebec during these early years were made by Catholic priests in order to ensure the preferred content of the Church (Véronneau, “The Cinema of Quebec”). One of the most prominent “Father Filmmakers” was Rev. Albert Tessier (see Fig. 8).
From 1925 until his death in 1976, he made more than seventy documentary films making him one of Canada’s most prolific documentary filmmakers of all time (“Albert Tessier”). Sanctioned by the Church, many of his educational film subjects were about nature, Quebec history, religion,
Figure 8 Father Albert Tessier
and how “strong women” (1938) were becoming “social misfits” (1948) (“Albert Tessier”). Once again, we see an example of documentary film being used as propaganda by an institution in Canada, this time, the Catholic Church.
Having received his PhD in theology from Rome in 1922, Tessier moved back to Quebec and immediately began using the new medium of film to produce educational films primarily about agriculture and nature. His devotion to using film as an educational tool to “build and fortify” (MacKenzie, 11) rural communities resulted in the City of Paris honouring him with their French Academy Medal in 1959 recognizing his films for “their influence on the evolution and progress of the French life in Canada” (Groulx, “Tessier, Albert”). Twenty-one years later, the province of Quebec introduced the Albert Tessier Prize honoring “outstanding careers in Quebec cinema”. The recognition, both at home and abroad, of the contribution to documentary film in Canada by Father Tessier pays tribute to his community-based filmmaking technique, a method that would later become known as the participatory mode of documentary filmmaking. He developed this technique to better represent the voice of those he profiled in order to improve their lives. Both Church and government responded to these films by providing aid to these rural, northern Quebec communities, demonstrating the success of this method.
According to Quebec cinema historian Scott MacKenzie, the much-heralded work of Father Tessier represented a shift in Quebec filmmaking “from feature films to documentary, from entertainment to socially activist filmmaking” (MacKenzie, 10). MacKenzie explains that Father Tessier travelled the province taking his films to rural areas and screened them with ad-lib voice-over. Tessier would then re-edit the films taking into account the discussions he had had with his audiences. According to MacKenzie, this process had a great influence on the NFB’s Challenge for Change (CFC) series.
What is of interest here is…the concern with building a discursive community through the use of cinematic images. This desire pre-dates…the theoretical and practical strategies developed in the Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle programmes of the 1960s. (MacKenzie, 10-11)
Tessier’s discursive community approach inadvertently represents one of the first attempts at participatory documentary filmmaking in Canada. In establishing a standard of community involvement in the documentary filmmaking process, and with the social issue slant of the CFC’s use of this technique, films made this way are seen to represent a kind of “reverse propaganda”.
The messaging in these films came from the bottom up, from the public to its government, instead of from the top down, as was previously the successful model. Tessier’s innovative method was mirrored by Colin Low in the CFC film series of the NFB. Appropriately, Low’s success with Tessier’s technique was later honoured by the province of Quebec when Low become a recipient of the Albert Tessier Award in 1997.
This participatory approach is one of the keystones of successful documentary filmmaking whose intentions are creating positive social change, a technique that will be examined more extensively in Chapter 2.