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Michel Brault
b. June 25, 1928 in Montréal, Québec
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Michel Brault at Hot Docs 2012. Photo Copyright © Ralph Lucas
Michel Brault is a writer-editor-director-cinematographer. In fact, he is often considered to be Canada’s most gifted cinematographer and an innovative, seminal force in Quebec cinema since the 1950s. His early cameraman work with Gilles Groulx, Claude Jutra and Pierre Perrault virtually defines the look of classic Quebec cinema. He became involved with filmmaking while still at university and joined the National Film Board in 1956, working on the celebrated Candid Eye series. From 1961 to 1962 he was in France, where he worked with directors such as Jean Rouch and Mario Ruspoli, and shot the influential Chronique d’un été with Raoul Coutard and others. In France he is considered an originator and one of the purist practitioners of cinéma-vérité. Brault returned to Quebec and the NFB, but quit the Board in 1965 when Pierre Juneau, the director of French production, refused to okay his first fiction feature, Entre la mer et l’eau douce. He has since pursued a very successful freelance career in feature films, documentaries, shorts, and television. His cinematography ranges from the gritty cinéma-vérité style of À tout prendre to the lyricism of Kamouraska, and his directorial work from the terse documentary stylings of La Lutte to smoothly proficient television dramas such as Les Noces du papier. He won Canadian Film Awards for lensing Mon oncle Antoine and Le Temps d’une chasse, and Genie Awards for his work on Les Bons Débarras and Threshold. Les Ordres, which he directed, shot and wrote, won him three more CFAs and he shared the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975. The film seamlessly fuses documentary and fiction styles while dramatizing the trauma of innocent people caught up in the October Crisis of 1970. It is still regarded as a masterpiece of Canadian cinema. Part of a preface to an interview recorded in 1980 with Claude Jutra, the famed Québec director said this of Michel Brault: Michel Is a cameraman whose contribution is so important as to be equal to that of a film
auteur. But he's not just that. When he wants to, he can also be a film director. And a script
writer, while we're at it. He makes up a story and puts it down on paper. He works out the stage
direction. He directs the actors. Beginning with La fleur de l'Age and continuing with Entre la
mer et l'eau douce, he reached the apogee of his career with Les ordres. An astounding
undertaking. Never has a dissident position been so clearly enunciated in Quebec cinema or indeed in Canadian cinema.
These are Michel Brault's credits as a director.
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Features & TV Movies:
VR indicates Direct-to-Video Release
Les Raquetteurs (1958)
Coup d'oeil nº 101 (1958)
La Lutte (1961)
Québec-U.S.A. ou L'invasion pacifique (1962)
Les enfants du silence (1962
Pour la suite du monde (1963)
Le temps perdu (1964)
À tout prendre (1964)
Geneviève (1964)
La Fleur de l'âge, ou Les adolescentes (1964) (segment "Geneviève")
Entre la mer et l'eau douce (1967)
Les enfants de Néant (1968)
Le beau plaisir (1968)
Éloge du chiac (1969)
L'Acadie, l'Acadie (1971
Les ordres (1974)
A Freedom to Move (1985)
Les noces de papier (TV-1989)
Montréal vu par... (segment La Dernière partie, 1991)
Shabbot Shalom (TV-1994)
Mon amie Max (1994)
Ozias Leduc, comme l'espace et le temps (1996)
Quand je serai parti... vous vivrez encore (1999)
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