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A scene from The Devil’s Share. Deftly selecting clips from nearly 200 films from the National Film Board of Canada archives, director Luc Bourdon reinterprets the historical record, offering us a new and distinctive perspective on the Quiet Revolution.Robin Spry

Almost 10 years ago, on the 70th anniversary of the National Film Board, Luc Bourdon's collage film The Memories of Angels caused a minor sensation on the Canadian film-festival circuit. Using no narration or exposition, the film impressionistically documents Montreal during its postwar years, collecting sounds and images from more than 120 NFB documentaries from the 1950s and 60s.

Memories is a love letter to both the cosmopolitan, neon-lit metropolis of yore and the once-mighty National Film Board itself, which moved its headquarters to Montreal in 1956 and served as the de facto home of Canadian filmmaking for decades. It won the prize for Best Canadian or Québécois film at Montreal's Festival de nouveau cinéma and landed on the Toronto International Film Festival's annual list of the best Canadian films, providing the NFB with a much-needed publicity boost at a time when it seemed less relevant than ever.

On the cusp of the NFB's 80th anniversary, Bourdon and editor Michel Giroux return with The Devil's Share, a spiritual sequel to Memories that also repurposes footage from hundreds of NFB films and contextualizes them within an exhilarating 102-minute historical document of Quebec "from the Quiet Revolution to the referendum" (as the trailer puts it). As the title suggests, The Devil's Share is a darker, more critical document of its time than its predecessor.

"It was like the yin and the yang, it was black and white, it was totally different," Bourdon said over the phone from Montreal. "Because of the politics, the revolution, '68, because of Vietnam." For Bourdon, the title of his new work is both a sly joke about the declining power of the clergy following the Quiet Revolution and a reference to many fraught household conversations that occurred between members of different generations: "When you were young and progressive and in the mood to do revolution, you were the devil."

Curiously, both films share a piece of footage from William Brind's Impressions from Expo 67, an NFB short that documents Montreal's oft-mythologized 1967 World's Fair with colourful scenes of visitors milling in the fairground, a freshly-constructed Habitat 67 reflected in the windows of a train, and footage taken from a monorail car as it travels through Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome above the American Pavilion (now Montreal's Biosphère).

In Memories, footage of Expo 67 plays over the credits as a coda to the film, suggesting a jump forward in time, with its modern architecture and utopian promise. But in The Devil's Share, it appears at the beginning of the film, quickly swallowed by the political struggles of the next decade. "It's the encounter of modernity with the past," Bourdon said. "We jumped into the future with the subway, and with all that new architecture. It exposed us to films, to worlds, to countries, but, unfortunately, we resumed a lot of our history in just that event."

The Devil's Share documents the rise of Quebec nationalism, reflected in the debate over newly imposed language laws and the rise of the Parti Québécois from fringe group to governing majority. Bourdon's film moves swiftly from issue to issue, showing us a diverse set of reactions to social changes – from the student protests of 1968; to a talk-radio discussion on women in the workplace; to a boardroom of anglophone executives discussing the impact of Bill 63; to the imposition of martial law during the October Crisis.

To make the film, Bourdon and his researchers digitized 320 NFB films made during the period, both English and French. "It was clear, slowly but surely, that I could concentrate on Quebec," Bourdon said. "But there are also different communities. There are the Anglos, there are the Natives, there are the French, and there are the Acadians."

For Bourdon, these struggles and movements were all connected on a generational level. "The Devil's Share was everywhere," he said. "There were strong discussions about all those issues; nationalism was one but feminism was one, too." Still, Bourdon admitted there are gaps in the NFB collection. Although he tried to include stories of immigrants in the province, "there were not so many films about that issue." Also, Bourdon estimated that out of the 320 films used, only 21 were directed by women. (The English program of the NFB formed Studio D for women filmmakers in 1974, but a French-language equivalent would not be created until 1986 with the Regard de femmes program.)

In one remarkable piece of footage, taken from Robin Spry's Action: The October Crisis of 1970, we see René Lévesque as he prepares for a television interview. "Goddammit, we're not a soap opera," he tells a flustered reporter after being told he only has 60 seconds to speak on the issue.

Considering how many films, television programs and books have re-interrogated this time in history since the 1970s, Bourdon considered the possibility that another film on the subject might seem superfluous, but it's a scene like this – featuring an emotionally distraught, foul-mouthed, chain-smoking Lévesque forced to cram his inner turmoil into a 60-second sound bite – that both challenges and transcends the possibilities of televised journalism, and in turn reveals the value of the National Film Board in documenting our history.

The Devil's Share opens Feb. 16 in Montreal, Quebec City and Sherbrooke.

At the European premiere actors including Lupita Nyong'o, Michael B Jordan and Chadwick Boseman talk about the importance of the Black Panther movie for young people.

Reuters

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