Take It All

Snapshot

À tout prendre — released in English as Take It All, a flattening of an idiom that means something closer to "all things considered" — is Claude Jutra's first feature and, by broad consensus, the founding work of modern Québécois fiction cinema. It is an autobiographical film in the most literal sense available: Jutra plays a filmmaker named Claude, and Johanne Harrelle, a Haitian-born model then living in Montreal, plays Johanne, the woman with whom Jutra had in fact been involved. The film narrates their affair, its collapse, a pregnancy, and Claude's halting acknowledgement of his own homosexuality, in a first-person voice that is by turns lyrical, evasive, and mercilessly self-accusing.

Made outside the National Film Board over roughly two years and financed privately, it arrived in 1963 as something Quebec cinema had not yet produced: a feature-length fiction that used the tools and reflexes of direct cinema to look inward rather than outward. It won the Canadian Film Award for Best Feature Film for 1964 and has remained, ever since, both canonical and unsettling — a film whose reputation is inseparable from the biography of the man who made it.

Industry & production

The production circumstances are essential to what the film is. By 1963 Jutra was an established National Film Board director in the ONF's young French-language unit, with a decade of shorts behind him. But the NFB's mandate in this period was documentary and public information; the Board had not yet committed to French-language dramatic features, and a confessional autobiography about an interracial affair and a director's homosexuality was not a project any state agency of the era was going to underwrite. Jutra therefore made it independently, shooting intermittently over a long stretch with equipment and personnel borrowed from the direct-cinema milieu, and with private backing — by most accounts principally from the Montreal businessman Robert Hershorn, a friend and patron of the scene. The film is often described as the first significant privately produced French-Canadian feature of the modern period, and the description is fair even if one can argue about precedents.

The consequences are visible in every reel. There was no shooting schedule in the industrial sense, so the film could be assembled opportunistically, in fragments, across seasons; the cast is largely non-professional and drawn from Jutra's own circle, appearing as versions of themselves; locations are apartments, streets, parties, a beach, the interiors of a Montreal that had never been filmed this way in fiction. The economics of the enterprise are also why the film took years to reach its final form — post-production, particularly sound, was protracted.

It premiered at the Montreal International Film Festival in 1963 and circulated through festivals and cinephile channels rather than commercial exhibition. It was never a popular success in any conventional sense, and precise financial figures are not reliably in the public record; claims about its budget or returns should be treated with suspicion.

Technology

À tout prendre sits exactly on the technological threshold that made the 1960s new cinemas possible. The enabling apparatus was the lightweight synchronous-sound package developed and refined in the late 1950s: portable reflex cameras that could be shoulder-carried and hand-held, the Nagra tape recorder for untethered location sound, and fast panchromatic black-and-white stock that could be pushed in processing to shoot interiors on practical light. Michel Brault, one of the film's cameramen, was among the people who had helped drive that toolkit forward in the field, including on Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronique d'un été (1961).

But the film's relationship to this technology is knowing rather than naive, and this is the crucial point. Despite its hand-held, available-light surface, much of À tout prendre was not recorded with sync sound at all: substantial portions were shot silent and post-synchronized, with dialogue, effects, and Jutra's narration built afterward in the cutting room. The film therefore looks like direct cinema and sounds like something constructed — a discrepancy Jutra exploits rather than conceals. Where Chronique d'un été insists that its sound is captured truth, À tout prendre uses the vocabulary of captured truth to stage a fiction, and lets the seams show.

The film circulated in 35mm black-and-white; the specifics of gauge and blow-up in its original production chain are not consistently documented across sources, and I would not assert them.

Technique

Cinematography

The camera is nervous, mobile, close, and unembarrassed by imperfection: handheld follows through crowded rooms, wide-angle proximity to faces, exposure that gives up highlights to hold a lamplit interior, focus that hunts. The photography was shared among several of the cameramen who defined Quebec's direct-cinema generation, with Michel Brault and Jean-Claude Labrecque the names most consistently attached; the exact division of labor among the film's shooting personnel is not firmly established in the literature, and credits vary between sources.

What distinguishes the images from documentary practice is their willingness to become expressive. Jutra will hold on Harrelle's face in a soft, frankly adoring key one moment and then cut to something graphically abstract — a high-contrast fragment, a burst of white, a face isolated against black. The film alternates between a reportorial mode (the party, the street, the ordinary apartment) and a lyrical one, and the switch is usually motivated by Claude's interior state rather than by the scene's dramatic requirements.

Editing

Editing is where the film does its real thinking. Jutra cut it himself, over a long period, and the montage is the primary authorial instrument: jump cuts within a single gesture, elliptical leaps across weeks, freeze frames, sudden accelerations, associative inserts that erupt out of a conversation and vanish. Sequences are frequently built as collage — a rush of fragments carrying an emotional state rather than an action. The film also runs image against narration, so that what we are told and what we are shown drift apart, and the drift becomes the meaning.

The comparison to Godard's À bout de souffle (1960) is unavoidable and was made at the time; the elision-as-rhythm principle is shared. But Jutra's cutting is less about coolness than about evasion — the cuts enact a man skipping over the parts of his life he cannot bear to sit inside.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Staging is naturalistic at the level of behavior and highly artificial at the level of design. Scenes of talk are played loosely, with overlapping business and the slack timing of non-actors, in real rooms. Against this, Jutra inserts frankly theatrical passages: masquerade and costume, fantasy interpolations, moments where Claude imagines rather than lives. The film's most discussed formal gambit is its use of direct address and self-reference — Claude is a filmmaker, the film knows it is a film, and the boundary between the person Jutra and the character Claude is deliberately left unrepaired.

Sound

The soundtrack is the film's most radical element and the one that most clearly separates it from its documentary neighbors. Jutra's voice-over is nearly continuous and does far more than narrate: it comments, apologizes, lies, revises, and occasionally addresses Johanne directly in the second person. Because the dialogue is largely post-synchronized, the entire audio field has a slight airlessness — voices sitting in front of their spaces rather than in them — which lends the whole film a quality of recollection, of events being spoken over from a later vantage.

Music is used sparingly and pointedly, with Maurice Blackburn — the NFB's house composer and a frequent Jutra collaborator — credited with the score; jazz and source music carry much of the film's Montreal texture. The music is generally deployed against the image's emotional grain rather than with it.

Performance

Harrelle is the film's center of gravity and its most persuasive presence. Untrained, playing a version of herself opposite the man who had actually been her lover, she gives a performance of composure and withheld anger that the film never fully domesticates — she consistently seems to know more than the film's narrator does. Jutra's own performance is a study in charm as a defense mechanism: light, deflecting, physically restless, and the film is clear-eyed enough to present this as a failing rather than a virtue. The supporting playing, drawn from friends and from Montreal's theater and film worlds, is deliberately unpolished; the veteran stage actress Tania Fédor appears as Claude's mother, a piece of casting that gives the film's one properly "acted" register a pointed formality against the amateurism around it.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The mode is confessional autofiction: a first-person account, presented as truth, structured as memory, and admitting throughout that memory is self-serving. The through-line is simple — meeting, affair, disclosure, pregnancy, retreat — but it is delivered non-chronologically and porously, interrupted by fantasy, digression, and commentary.

Two disclosures organize the film. Johanne tells Claude about her origins, a scene the film treats as a revelation and which modern viewers rightly read as the film's most compromised passage: it stages her Blackness as a secret to be confessed, with the racial imagination doing the work belonging to Claude rather than to her. Later, Claude admits — to her, to himself, to us — his attraction to men. That admission, in a 1963 Canadian feature, was without real precedent, and it is delivered without the alibi of tragedy or pathology that the period's cinema normally required.

The film's dramatic engine is not conflict but self-exposure, and its arc is the gradual discrediting of its own narrator. By the end, the voice we have been trusting has been revealed as the least reliable thing in the picture.

Genre & cycle

Nominally a romantic drama; functionally, a hybrid that has no settled genre home. It belongs to the international cycle of early-1960s first-person modernist features — films that borrowed documentary tools to make fiction about their makers — alongside Chronique d'un été, the early Godard, and the more essayistic strains of the nouvelle vague. Within Canada it inaugurates a cycle rather than joining one: the personal, low-budget, semi-documentary Québécois feature, of which Gilles Groulx's Le Chat dans le sac (1964) is the immediate and more politically explicit successor.

It is also, retrospectively, a founding text of Canadian queer cinema, though it precedes any such category by decades.

Authorship & method

Jutra (1930–1986) came to film with a medical degree and an unusual apprenticeship. He collaborated with Norman McLaren on the NFB's A Chairy Tale (1957), performing opposite the animated chair; he spent time in Paris around 1958–59, where Anna la bonne (1959), built on a Jean Cocteau text, was made with François Truffaut's support; and he traveled to Africa with Jean Rouch, an experience he wrote up for Cahiers du cinéma in 1961 under the title "En courant derrière Rouch" — running after Rouch. Those three encounters map the film precisely: McLaren's formal play and comfort with the fabricated image, Cocteau's confessional-poetic mode and its license for the artist to be his own subject, Rouch's method of provoking truth by asking people to perform themselves.

His method on À tout prendre was accumulation rather than execution: shoot when possible, with whoever was available, then discover the film in the edit. The key collaborators are the direct-cinema cameramen, chiefly Brault and Labrecque, whose reflexes gave the film its documentary credibility; Blackburn's music; and above all Harrelle, whose participation is not merely performance but co-authorship of the material, since the events being restaged were hers as much as his. Jutra wrote and cut the film himself, and the writing is largely the narration — the script in any conventional sense is thin, and the film's language is assembled after the fact.

Jutra would go on to make Mon oncle Antoine (1971), long regarded as the canonical Canadian feature, and Kamouraska (1973). He died in 1986, having been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease; his body was recovered from the St. Lawrence the following spring.

Movement / national cinema

The film is the hinge between Quebec's documentary tradition and its fiction cinema. The ONF's French unit had, through the late 1950s and early 1960s, produced a body of cinéma direct — Les Raquetteurs (1958), La Lutte (1961), on which Jutra himself worked — that gave Quebec a way of seeing itself for the first time. À tout prendre takes that instrument and turns it around. It proves that the direct-cinema toolkit could sustain a feature-length narrative, and that the narrative could be about a Québécois subjectivity rather than a Québécois folkway.

Its politics are oblique where its successors' were explicit. It arrives in the middle of the Quiet Revolution, in the year the FLQ's first bombs went off and the journal Parti pris was founded, and it registers that moment as a crisis of the self rather than of the nation — a young, educated, francophone man unable to decide what he is. Critics have long read Claude's paralysis as an allegory of a society in the same condition; Jutra neither invites nor forecloses the reading.

Era / period

1963 is the year the international art cinema's first-person turn crystallized — Fellini's 8½, Godard's Le Mépris, Resnais's Muriel — and À tout prendre belongs to that moment without deriving from it, having been in production since roughly 1961. Its Montreal is specific and now archival: a bilingual, rapidly secularizing city with a small bohemia, jazz clubs, and a francophone intelligentsia discovering that it could speak in its own voice. The film's treatment of contraception, abortion, and homosexuality was possible in 1963 Quebec only because the film operated outside commercial exhibition and outside the Church-inflected consensus that was, precisely then, coming apart.

Themes

Identity as evasion is the master theme: Claude's inability to be one thing — Québécois or cosmopolitan, straight or gay, lover or observer — presented not as a rich ambiguity but as a moral failure with costs borne mostly by Johanne. Race is the film's most difficult register: it is genuinely groundbreaking in depicting an interracial relationship with tenderness and without punishment, and simultaneously compromised by an exoticizing gaze it half-recognizes and does not escape. Sexuality is treated as something to be confessed, which dates the framing while making the confession itself remarkable for its moment.

Underneath sits the film's most durable subject: the ethics of turning a real person into material. Jutra films the woman he hurt, casts her as herself, narrates her from his point of view, and the film keeps flinching at what it is doing without ever stopping.

Reception, canon & influence

Contemporary reception in Quebec was sharply divided. Younger cinephile critics, particularly around the journal Objectif, recognized it as a break with everything Quebec cinema had been; others found it self-absorbed, formally undisciplined, and morally exhibitionist. Both readings have survived, and the film has never fully settled into comfortable classic status. It won the Canadian Film Award for Best Feature Film for 1964 and traveled the festival circuit, but it did not find a general audience.

Backward, its debts are legible and were acknowledged by Jutra: Rouch and Morin's provoked-truth method; Cocteau's confessional lyricism; Godard's editing license; McLaren's formal irreverence; and, closer to home, the Quebec direct-cinema shorts he had helped shoot.

Forward, its influence is foundational rather than stylistic. It established that a Québécois feature could be made privately, personally, and cheaply, and Le Chat dans le sac followed within a year; the line runs through Jean Pierre Lefebvre, the early Denys Arcand, and a long tradition of Québécois first-person filmmaking that arguably reaches Xavier Dolan. Its frank, non-pathologizing treatment of a bisexual or gay protagonist gives it a claim as a precursor of Canadian queer cinema. It has appeared on Canadian critics' polls of the country's most important films, and restoration work by the Québécois heritage initiative Éléphant has kept it accessible.

Its standing was complicated in 2016, when the publication of Yves Lever's biography of Jutra prompted allegations that Jutra had sexually abused minors. The allegations, which Jutra — dead thirty years — could not answer and which were never tested in court, led Quebec to rename its Prix Jutra film awards as the Prix Iris and to remove his name from public spaces. For a film that is explicitly autobiographical and explicitly about a man's self-serving account of his own conduct, this is not an external biographical footnote; it has changed how the work is watched and taught. À tout prendre remains what it was — the film that made Québécois fiction cinema possible — while having become considerably harder to hold.