Chapter 1 - Denis Villeneuve, Québécois and Citizen of the World

Summary

A successful international director, Denis Villeneuve’s specificity as a Québécois nonetheless shapes his entire oeuvre, a unified body of work despite its diversity. His Quebec-made auteur films and Hollywood forays into genre consistently engage a protagonist’s identity quest, the problem of origins and reproduction, and involve literal and figurative border crossings. This chapter situates Villeneuve in the context of Quebec film, including his identification as a ‘nouvelle génération’ filmmaker (Chartier 145; Poirier 33n12). It then engages his films’ varying degrees of québécitude (Quebec-ness), but also their increasing universalism (Privet 15). I frame this discussion with the Deleuzian concepts of territorialisation and deterritorialisation, arguing that Villeneuve’s protagonists consistently leave the safety of home and its predetermined notions of identity, crossing borders to achieve a certain epiphany. I conclude that Villeneuve’s entire corpus remains in touch with his Québécois origins, but his career trajectory embodies his generation’s turn away from their forebearers’ preoccupation with the (failed) nationalist project of sovereignty, reflecting a new aspiration to become citizens of the world.

ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF A NEW GENERATION

Quebec has developed a considerable cinematic tradition given its political status as a province of Canada, exceeding definitions of a ‘small nation’ cinema. It produces both independent auteur films and Hollywood-style mainstream cinema and participates in a nationalist agenda of projecting an image of what it means to be Québécois. Referred to as ‘Quebec national cinema’, French language film produced largely in Montreal (although increasingly also in regional settings) feeds a collective ‘historical imagination’, maps out a specific territory, and reflects identitary models, consistently revealing its québécitude. This appears most obviously in locally rooted film settings, dialogue in vernacular Québécois French, references to a common (film) history, and portrayals of conflicted individuals unable to find a clear identity, allegories of their homeland’s (post)colonial dynamics and ambiguous national status.

Quebec national cinema’s history can be traced back to film’s earliest days, with modern filmmaking coinciding with Quebec’s Quiet Revolution in the 1960s (Marsolais 16). At first working in documentary, developing the cinéma direct style, a generation of pioneers projected an image of the nation and its subjects using institutional frameworks developed by the federal Canadian state.