Take It All · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A face in lamplight, held a beat longer than the scene needs. The highlights are blown out, given up so the lamp could stay in the shot, and the focus hunts before it settles. Jutra's camera looks at Johanne Harrelle with open, unembarrassed love. Then a cut, and the screen is a burst of white, or a face marooned on black. Nothing in the story caused that cut. Something in Claude did.

À tout prendre is built out of gaps like that one, and the gaps are where it does its thinking.

Deleuze has a name for a cut that fails to join: the interstice, or the irrational cut. Ordinary editing is grammar. This, therefore that. An irrational cut is a hole that both shots border and neither one explains, and you register it as a feeling before you can account for it. Jutra edited the film himself, in fragments, over a couple of years, and it is full of jumps inside a single gesture, elisions that skip weeks, freeze frames, associative inserts that erupt out of a conversation and disappear. He took the device from Breathless, where the jump cut was tempo, a way of making the film move faster than life. In his hands it turns into a symptom. The cuts are the parts of his life he cannot bear to sit inside, and you learn the man from what his film refuses to hold.

The abstract flashes work the same way. A high-contrast fragment, a flare of white, a face isolated against black. You cannot take these in at a glance and move on, because they have stopped behaving like action. Deleuze calls such an image a lectosign, an image that asks to be read. In a film whose surface is all reportage, they are the moments where the reportage admits it has an author.

Even the plain footage carries a documentary reflex. Michel Brault, who shot part of it, brought the habit he had built on Les Raquetteurs: wide-angle, handheld, working from inside the crowd, arriving late and hunting for the subject. The camera becomes another person in the room, with its own hesitations, so that we spend the film watching someone watch. Deleuze's word for that is the dicisign, perception caught in the act of perceiving.

Then the voice. It runs almost without pause, and it is Jutra's own. It narrates, apologizes, revises, occasionally turns and speaks to Johanne in the second person. It also lies. And here is the thing people miss about this film: most of the dialogue was post-synchronized, recorded after the fact, so even the scenes that look grabbed on the run have voices sitting slightly in front of their rooms instead of inside them. The whole soundtrack is spoken over the film from somewhere later. Sound and image stop being two records of one event and become two accounts of it. That is what Deleuze means by audiovisual disjunction: the drift between the track and the picture carries a meaning neither of them carries alone.

That drift is a small heresy, and it is aimed at the strongest claim of the era. Direct cinema's contract was that sound proves the image; the Nagra and the shoulder-carried camera were supposed to be a machine for not lying. Chronique d'un été insists on it. Jutra hired the very people who had built that toolkit, kept the entire look of captured truth, and then constructed the truth afterward in the cutting room without hiding the seams. Deleuze would call this the powers of the false, and it is not a fancy word for deception. It means truth produced by the telling rather than guaranteed by the apparatus. Once the voice has apologized and revised a few times, you cannot check it against the images, because the images were never the evidence. The film asks you to decide what is true about a man from a record he controls, and it keeps both versions, the told and the shown, without reconciling them.

Which makes Claude a forger in Deleuze's sense. Not a con artist. A person who exists only in the act of making himself up, and who comes out slightly different each time. A filmmaker played by a filmmaker, under his own first name, with charm deployed as a way of not being reached. Masquerade and costume, fantasy interpolations, direct address, and the seam between Jutra and Claude left deliberately unrepaired. His acknowledgement of his own homosexuality arrives inside a machine the film has already taught you to distrust. That is what gives it its charge. He tells the truth in the one register where nothing can be automatically believed.

He knew what he was doing. Jutra had written up Rouch's method for Cahiers, and Rouch is the ancestor twice over. Moi, un noir supplies the machine: mute location footage retro-fitted with the protagonist's own improvised commentary on his restaged life, so the soundtrack becomes an unreliable self-account instead of a script. Chronique d'un été supplies the protocol: real people asked to perform themselves in front of a sync-sound camera, and the filmmakers then handing their own method to the audience for judgement. Deleuze's name for what those films catch is fabulation, people in the act of legending themselves, where the legend does work no record could do. Jutra's contribution was to turn the apparatus around and legend his own bad faith. His cast, drawn from his own circle, plays versions of themselves. Cocteau's Le Testament d'Orphée had already licensed the poet to be his own on-screen subject and to cut freely between confession and staged dream, and Jutra, who had filmed a Cocteau text before, takes both the permission and the masks.

Because everything is narrated from later, the film's present tense is already a memory while it is still happening. Deleuze calls that fusion the crystal-image: an actual moment and its own reflection sealed together so you cannot pry them apart. Jutra the narrator and Claude the man are its two faces. A perfect crystal has no outside, and this one nearly is one. It has a flaw. Her name is Johanne. Harrelle, untrained, playing a version of herself opposite the man who had in fact been her lover, holds a composure and a banked anger the film never manages to absorb, and she consistently appears to know more than the man narrating her. Deleuze's cracked crystal is precisely that: a fissure in an otherwise sealed world through which something escapes. Everything Claude says has passed through his machine. She has not. Her face is the one place in the film where you are looking at something the narrator does not own, and it is the reason the film survives its own self-absorption.

What it did to filmmaking is easy to state and was hard to do. Before this, a first-person voice in a fiction feature was a guide. Jutra made it a suspect, and made editing the place where a psychology gets drawn rather than where causality gets served. He did it outside the National Film Board, because no state agency in 1963 was going to fund a confession about an interracial affair and a director's desire for men, on private money, shot in borrowed hours across two years, in apartments and streets that Quebec fiction had never looked at this way. It is by broad consensus the founding work of modern Québécois fiction cinema, and it founded that cinema in the first person, as self-examination rather than national portraiture. Its reputation is now inseparable from its maker's biography, and the doubt the film casts on its own narrator has only sharpened with time.

One detail I keep coming back to. Years earlier, Jutra had performed opposite a stop-motion chair in A Chairy Tale, learning to hold a straight face inside an image everyone could see was fabricated. He never stopped doing it.

So watch it twice. The first time you will follow the voice, because it is charming and that is its job. The second time, watch what it skips, and watch Johanne in the seconds after it stops talking. The film never settles whether the confession is honesty or the most sophisticated deflection Claude ever managed. Leaving that open is not a failure of nerve. It is the one unimpeachable piece of truth-telling in it.