A Saint-Henri le cinq septembre is a key film in the development of direct cinema by the French unit of the National Film Board. Presented as a series of vignettes of a closely knit, working-class community in Montreal – seen between dawn and midnight on the first day of school – the film was a study of the ways in which small-town individuals and institutions behave during periods of rapid change.
The film offered an alternative to the spontaneous, non-interventionist approach advocated by Pierre Perrault, Jean-Claude Labrecque and others. Director Hubert Aquin and producer Fernand Dansereau relied on research, pre-production and a prepared script in both the filming and editing of the "candid" footage; the final film also had a voice-over commentary (which Janice L. Pallister, writing in The Cinema of Quebec, felt amounted "to an apology (or defense) for cinéma direct"). The aim was to make a more political statement than the filmmakers felt was possible using "purist" direct cinema methods. However, when A Saint-Henri le cinq septembre was televised, it provoked a highly negative reaction from the people who had been filmed; they felt debased and even shamed by the filmmakers’ observations of them. One family felt so stigmatized they removed their children from the local school.
Several years later, Dansereau publicly rejected the methods used in the film, stressing that, despite the filmmakers’ good intentions, the techniques were essentially exploitative and relied far too heavily on an outsider’s perspective. When he set out in 1966 to make St-Jérôme (1968), a similar study of a small town community, he gave the people who participated the right to edit from the final cut anything they did not want included in the film. |
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