Pierre Perrault (29 June 1927 – 23 June 1999) was a Canadian documentary film director with the National Film Board of Canada. Over his 40-year career, he directed 32 films and was one of Canada's most important filmmakers, although he is largely unknown outside of Québec.

Early life

Perrault was born and raised in Montreal, the son of a prosperous lumber merchant, and attended the most prestigious private schools in the city. Due to rebellious behaviour, he was expelled from Collège de Montréal, and Collège André-Grasset before graduating from Collège Sainte-Marie de Montréal. While there, with Hubert Aquin and Marcel Dubé, he founded the student journal Cahiers d’Arlequin, in which he published his first play, Pierre en vrac. In 1948, he entered the Université de Montréal Law School, where he was editor of the student journal and won three hockey championships. From there, he studied the history of law at the University of Paris and international law at the University of Toronto. He was called to the bar in 1954 but he had already realized that the law was not his calling.

Career

In 1955, Perrault began writing a weekly radio show at Radio Canada. In 1956, he permanently left the law and began writing for Le chant des hommes, a daily Radio Canada series about folk music. By then, he had married archaeologist Yolande Simard, who was from the Charlevoix region, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. In 1956, with French folk singer Jacques Douai, the couple traveled through Charlevoix, interviewing locals and recording their music. These interviews and recordings became the basis of his weekly radio series, Au pays de Neufve-France which, in turn, was the inspiration for a CBC television series of the same name. On that trip through Charlevoix, Perrault had met many artists and artisans, and he pitched the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) on the idea of doing a film about them. The result, Master Artisans of Canada, was Perrault's first film, and it would introduce Perrault to the director, producer and cinematographer Judith Crawley, who handled the English versions of his work for the rest of his career. Crawley and her husband, Budge Crawley owned a film production company which employed the French director René Bonnière. Perrault and Bonnière came up with the idea of turning the Charlevoix interviews and recordings, and the resultant radio show scripts, into documentary shorts. From 1960 to 1963, the two would create 14 films, 13 of which would become the NFB (and CBC) series St. Lawrence North. After his next film for the NFB, the critically acclaimed Pour la suite du monde Perrault became a full-time employee of the NFB in 1965. He went on to create another 16 films, most relating to Quebec's culture, society and environment. He retired in 1996 and died three years later, survived by his wife Yolande Simard Perrault (1928-2019) and their two children.

Legacy

Canadian film historian Peter Morris wrote this about Perrault in his 1984 book The Film Companion: "The most famous direct cinema filmmaker in Quebec, who developed a unique 'cinema of speech' that has 'spoken' about Quebec, its land and its people, and that has been at once witness of its past and often prophecy of its future. His approach involves close collaboration with his cinematographers (Michel Brault and Bernard Gosselin, who often co-direct), direct involvement with the people or events, and later, a careful construction of scenes in the editing room. From the 1960s and early 1970s (on Pour la suite du monde, Le règne du jour, Les voitures d'eau and L'Acadie L'Acadie?!) through his later films on Abitibi and First Nations people, he expressed the concept of 'ethnic class' that some feel avoids more basic issues, even though it gave voice to long-buried cultural aspirations." Perrault's life and work were analyzed by Jean-Daniel Lafond in the 1986 documentary Dream Tracks (Les Traces du rêve). The Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma film festival has established the Prix Pierre et Yolande Perrault for Best Documentary. Perrault’s papers are held in the Pierre Perrault Archives at Université Laval.

Honours

Filmography

All National Film Board of Canada

Film Awards

Winter Crossing at L'Isle-Aux-Coudres (1960) Pour la suite du monde (1963) Acadia Acadia?!? (1971) Oumigmag or the Fickle Art of Documentary Filmmaking (1993) Icewarrior (1996)

Literary Awards