Michel Brault & Pierre Perrault
National Film Board of Canada
1971
75 Minutes
This is the first film that I've watched from the National Film Board of Canada website which has recently made hundreds of its documentaries and animations available for streaming or download. I intend to gradually go through the NFB website's content and write about any films that I deem appropriate for this blog. As I'm moving through the NFB content alphabetically, Acadia Acadia?!? is the first such film, although there's a couple more in the A’s about the Oka standoff and the October Crisis of 1970 Quebec.
Acadia Acadia?!? is a black and white documentary that captures the short life of the Ralliement de la Jeunesse Acadienne, the student movement that called for the recognition of Acadian identity by the English political establishment in New Brunswick. This documentary was mostly shot at the University of Moncton, the first and only French language university in New Brunswich. The film's directors, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault, have worked in collaboration on a number of projects for the NFB and many of them focused on aspects of Francophone culture in Canada. With this film, Brault and Perrault focus on a small student activist movement centered on the campus of a small university in a small Canadian city, but their film opens up a discussion about the status of French Canadians outside of Quebec during the 1960s.
Acadia was once a French Colony that once existed east of New France (modern Quebec) where New Brunswick, mainland Nova Scotia, and eastern Quebec currently is. The Acadians were expelled from the region in the mid-18th century, settling in places like Louisiana following the French defeat to the English in their Colonial war for Canada. Many of the Acadians returned to eastern Canada, following their expulsion, and they established French speaking communities throughout their former colony. At the time of the events Brault and Perrault captured in their film, the city of Moncton was over 30% Francophone. This %30 was hardly represented in the political and educational institutions of New Brunswick however, and therefore this student movement emerged to fight for language rights by, in part, asserting their Acadian heritage.
The film captured many of the significant events of this movement. The successful call for a student strike at the Univertity of Moncton opened the documentary, which then segued into scenes of a large march for French language rights at Moncton city hall. The scenes of the students speaking with city hall council were quintessential of the 1960s zeitgeist, as they featured a condescending group of aging white (and in this context, Anglophone) blowhards, proud of their ignorance, talking down to a group of educated and angry young outsiders. The activists call for French to be recognized at city hall was rejected, showing how English, as the only recognized language of the political establishment of a city that's over a third Francophone, was a means of providing a barrier to access political power and services in that city. The activists did not take their rejection well and they left a pig's head on the lawn of the mayor's home.
Brault and Perrault mix scenes of activist action with talking head interviews with the Young Acadians, wherin the student agitators express their opinions on the English power structure of the province, the meaning of Acadia, the state of the University of Moncton, their views on direct action activism and violence, and their wish to express themselves without giving up their identity. The activists are clearly armed with recent sociological and postcolonial theories that contribute to many of the views they express in these interviews. There are also some scenes shot at an Acadian village where the activists discuss language and cultural politics with some of the villagers - this scene is the converse of a scene where the activists sat at the meeting of a loyalist organization, where during the recital of the oath to the Queen and when the members of this organization sang 'God Save the Queen', the students held up the clenched fist of activist solidarity.
The activists occupied the University of Moncton's science building for nine days in the winter of 1969. The students were raising questions about why their school received zero funding from the provincial government while the University of New Brunswick was heavily subsidized (thus making tuition lower for students, and enabling the institution to provide nicer facilities and better services.) The occupation ended with students submitting to police requests to move, despite earlier calls for passive non-violent resistance to the authorities, which pretty well caused the movement to dissipate. Shortly thereafter students returned to classes, and thirty students were expelled, including Michel Blanchard, one of the activist leaders who speaks throughout the documentary. Furthermore, the university closed its sociology department, the chief source of the social theories the activists operated on.
The English film is 75 minutes long, an abridged translation of the original French version that runs closer to two hours in length. One feature of the translation is that there is only one female translator voice, which is fine, it works, but I never noticed how other such films make the choice to translate the words of male speakers into a male voice. Overall, this film is probably one of the few sources of information on this particular movement, as a subaltern, Acadian, nationalism in Canada has mostly been a subject with regards to the First Nations or Quebec contexts.
Beginning in 2009, Michel Blanchard was permitted back onto the University of Moncton campus for the first time since 1970.
PS: Here is the link to watch the English version of the film on the National Film Board website.
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