the real and what it forgets
by Douglas Messerli
Claude Jutra (screenwriter and director) À tout prendre
(All Things Considered, aka Take It All) / 1963
Renowned filmmaker Claude Jutra,
having worked with French director Jean Rouch, was one of the central figures
of the Québécois film movement direct cinema, which employed lightweight
filmmaking equipment, hand-held cameras, and synchronous sound in order to get
to the heart of things in the early 1960s film directors’ attempts to both
“capture reality” and to question its relationship with the reality of cinema.
What makes a film seem “real” or, more importantly, how can the director bring
the “real” into his or her work of cinema.
Analogous, in some respects, to the French New Wave in the 1950s and
early 60s, which also questioned how to bring a sense of the real into
filmmaking—the movement would affect the works of US directors Richard Leacock,
D.A. Pennebaker, Terence Macartney-Filgate, and Albert and David Maysles—Jutra
filled his film with self-conscious representations of reality, large subtitles
(to remind us of one of the major character’s name, Johanne), and even
discussions about the subject, as when his character Victor (Victor Désy)
quotes Marcel Proust in this film, arguing that since experience consists
mostly of aural, gustatory, and olfactory sensations, there is no way cinema,
focused on the visual, can truly capture reality.
While most of the direct cinema works were documentaries, Jutra’s
semi-autobiographical film presents itself almost as a document with the
assistance of metaphorical and imaginative representations of experience. His
film even keeps many of the same first names of the characters involved, the
central figure for example being called Claude, played by the director himself
and Johanne (Johanne Harrelle) the black self-designated Haitian Creole woman
with whom he had an affair during this period.
Most of film focuses on Claude’s relationship with Johanne, who he meets
at a party which he hasn’t planned on attending. Intrigued with her beauty and,
probably—although he later denies it—the exoticism of her singing a Creole song
from her alleged homeland, he drags her back to his apartment, where they meet
up with his next door neighbor, Victor who is sleeping in Claude’s bed due to
the fact that his apartment is being repainted.
So begins the long voyage into love
between the two, despite his sexual relationships with other women such as
Barbara (Monique Mercure) and the woman currently acting in a movie he is
currently directing, Monique (Monique Joly). Victor, an actor, has his own
affairs.
What doesn’t get spoken or even hinted
at until half-way through the film, is that Claude is also struggling with his
latent homosexuality, the issue brought up in passing when Johanne asks him,
out of blue, “Have you ever wanted a man?” a question to which he never
replies, in that fact clearly admitting it is an issue with him.
Johanne, in turn, attempts to shed her
mendacities by admitting that she is not at all Haitian but was born to a poor
Canadian black woman who gave her up for adoption. Sent to a school for
homeless children, because of her color they were never able to find a couple
able to adopt her. Her solution to being a poor Canadian girl with no history
was to create one for herself. And
obviously it worked, allowing her a
career as a fashion model (Harrelle was one of the first black models of the
Montreal and New York City fashion scene) and perhaps finding a man who might
marry her in Claude.
Indeed, sometime soon after her
confession, as they spend a time deeply involved with each other, sharing a
life together in what the narrative voice describes as their little “prison,”
she discovers herself pregnant, bringing with it a far more complex series of
events.
Even before Johanne’s pregnancy, there
have been further suggestions that Claude has not yet been able to tame his
attractions to the same sex. From the beginning he describes it was a kind of
“longing,” a “dissatisfaction that taken the form of hope.”
And throughout the film his same-sex
urges are played out metaphorically through sudden encounters with what appear
to be a violent motorcycle stud, thugs who beat him, and gangsters who chase
him down with guns and shoot him dead. These figures haunt the last half of the
film, interrupting even moments when he is sitting beside her in the cold snow
of a park.
Moreover, once they discover her
pregnancy, he is forced both by her and his own self-doubts—as they prepare to
obtain a divorce from her husband and arrange for their own marriage as well as
imagining his needed career changes in order to support his new family—to
consult others, Johanne’s earlier boyfriend, Nicholas (Patrick Straram), still
in love with her; Claude’s wealthy but distant mother; and a priest who
befriended Claude during another crisis in his life.
Suddenly what appeared to be a pean to Johanne’s independent and
self-defined identity, turns the film into a kind of misogynistic and outright
sexist work, in which his mother covertly dismissed the relationship by arguing
about the impossible changes Claude would have to make and the priest who
suggests that all woman are secret manipulators of men and that the woman of
his dreams perhaps has had other men on the side, the child being the product
of such affairs, accordingly arguing that she may be simply taking advantage of
Claude’s desires. Even Nicholas sees it his role to protect and save her,
instead of supporting and advocating for her decisions.
By the time Claude has made the rounds,
he has determined not only to break off entirely with the woman he claimed to
love, but to borrow money in order to pay for an abortion. Shocked and
emotionally devastated by his utter dismissal of her, Johanne attempts to see
him (he will not even open his apartment door when she attempts a visit), to
write him (he throws away her letters), and even threatens suicide (which he
callously ignores), all the while intimating that his “hands are clean.”
Nothing is spoken, of course, about the
increased encounters with the “gangsters” for which he buys a machine-gun to
destroy in his imaginary battles, successful except that one finally gets him
with a last shot.
Obviously, Claude cannot escape his
desires, which perhaps have been at the heart of his inability to commit to
marriage and certainly are related to his misogynism. Finally, he realizes that
there is only one way to still the voices, as we walks off a pier into the cold
waters of The St. Lawrence River.
The 1963 film was a shocking for its self-revelations and open
representation of the creators’ own lives, and helped, along with his 1971
masterwork Mon oncle Antoine, his cinema vérité shorts such as Wrestling
and The Devil's Toy, his collaboration with the noted Canadian filmmaker
Norman McLaren, A Chairy Tale, and his big budget film, Kamouraska
(1973), to make Jutra one of the most acclaimed figures of Québécois culture.
As director and writer Pierre Jutras observes of the 1963 film:
“At the height of the Quiet Revolution, Claude Jutra brought Quebec
cinema directly into modernity.
Take It All (1963) is the first autobiographical feature film
made in Quebec using direct cinema methods and techniques. With its unusual
aesthetics focusing on the free and intimate expression of the main
protagonists, Claude and Johanne, the film was received with a mix of
astonished admiration and righteous indignation. Jutra had dared to recreate on
screen his own love story with Johanne Harrelle, one of the first black models
on the Montreal and New York fashion scene. It was the first time in America
that a bed scene was filmed with a white man and a black woman. Both freely
engage in mutual confession, and the game of truth leads Johanne to inquire
about Claude’s possible homosexuality. They also have to face the agonizing
dilemma of abortion when Johanne gets pregnant.
In this independent production, the actors improvise from their own
memories. The film’s whimsical tone, with laughter and the pleasure of
confiding ever present, even in the most difficult moments, give it a fresh and
enduring artistic vitality.”
Jutra’s involvement with the Québécois separatist movement and LGBTQ
rights in Montreal and Québec helped to make him an even more beloved citizen.
When, after being diagnosed for early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in the early
1980s, Jutra chose in 1986 to repeat precisely what the Claude of this movie
chooses, to jump from a pier into the St. Lawrence River, note in his pocket
“Je m'appelle Claude Jutra" with the recovery of the body in 1987.
An annual film award for a first-time director and the Prix Jutra
awarded annually for Québec cinema, were named in his honor as were several
streets, parks, and other locations throughout Montreal and province.
In 2016, 30 years after the director’s death, the author of a
biographical study of Jutra, Yves Lever, uncovered the fact, evidently
well-known among his peers, that Jutra was attracted to young teenage boys, and
had apparently had affairs with 14- and 15-year-old boys. Numerous individuals
and government agencies rose up in terror, describing him as a pedophile,
although none of the victims were willing to speak publicly and the legal age
of sexually activity during the period in which Jutra was said to have these
affairs was 14, which would disqualify that word from being applied to him.
However, soon after, a man did permit an interview in which he admitted that
Jutra had begun touching him at age 6, abuse which escalated over the next 10
years, suggesting that Jutra had indeed been a pedophile.
Suddenly the Prix Jutra was forced to change its name and the mayor of
Montreal erased most street and park names associated with him. Several
articles in The Guardian, MacLeans magazine, The Globe and
Mail, and elsewhere outlining the hypocrisy and pointlessness of these acts
appeared, but the most thorough and reasoned essay about the issue that I have
read is Matthew Hays’ “The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Claude Jutra Legacy, a
Year After the Scandal,” published in Canadian Notes and Queries, issue
99 (Spring 2017)
Los Angeles, October 8, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (October 2022).
