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Réflexions de Fernand Dansereau

Presentation by Fernand Dansereau at the Documentary Network’s Forum 2006 “Documentary and Television: From Marriage of Reason to True Love”

Why I Make Documentaries…

1. Like any professional filmmaker, I make documentaries to earn a living.

2. I make documentaries to pursue and refine if not a body of artistic work, at least the meaning of a professional career that has lasted for 50 years now.

3. Usually, I am struck by a subject. Sometimes it’s a form. It hounds me, haunts me. Almost always, I realize afterwards, when I have finished making the fiction or documentary film, that I was trying to resolve some life question that gnawed me. Retrospectively, it seems to me that just about everything I have done has been linked to the quest for meaning. That is what still drives me today.

4. When that quest pushes me to start a new project, I must first of all find a producer, which is far from obvious. You are looking not so much to be accepted as to be challenged and to feel a sense of connection. With that person, you must do the rounds of the institutions and broadcasters to raise the funds. It is long and sometimes arduous.

5. The project will change a lot during this marathon. Each of the partners you meet will want to clarify the intentions and often, more or less subtly, to change them.

6. When I was younger I grumbled a lot about these negotiations. But time has taught me that they have often helped the project. Step by step, the work matures, comes into focus, becomes more profound.

7. I have often experienced the heartbreak of refusals. Many projects never got made as I had intended them. But I have realized that in the long run, they never die completely. As long as I have not yet resolved the essential question that underlies them, they are reborn in some other form.

8. Over time, I have come to believe that film and television works are guided by a sort of karma. I now understand that through my work, I am in constant dialogue with what can be called the collective unconscious.

9. What that means is that the birth of a project does not depend solely on me. I belong to a community, a milieu. To a large extent—much more than I would have admitted in the past—it is the source of my inspiration.

10. It is the community or milieu that allows my question to emerge and encounter the affinities it needs to flower. Or slows it down, or prevents it. It happens through all the dialogues—the ones I mentioned earlier—with the producers, broadcasters and institutions. More or less consciously. It’s not for nothing that I speak of the collective unconscious.

11. In many cases, I believe I have been able to detect the action of that unconscious. To my mind, it is behind the most spectacular and unexpected successes, like that of the feature documentaries Être et avoir (To Be and To Have), Roger Toupin, épicier variétés and What Remains of Us and of the drama series La petite vie and Les filles de Caleb, and behind the impact of television documentaries like L’erreur boréale, (Forest Alert) and Les voleurs d’enfance (Thieves of Innocence). It seems to me that it is also behind some painful fiascos that occur when deserving works do not find an audience, failing to arrive at the right moment or in the right circumstances.

12. Naturally, we’d like to be more connected to this unconscious. Success would seem to come more easily. But it’s not easy an easy thing to grasp before it emerges. Especially since it moves around so much these days. Incidentally, it seems to me that it’s very hard to comprehend what is happening to us through the contemporary media.

13. In the daily lives of my father and mother, fantasy—that is, fiction, legends, tales, drama, and even theatre—played a very small role; a few hours a month at most. Today, we consume several hours of it every day.

14. In their time, the influx of information was minimal, highly localized and always filtered by powerful religious and social regulators. Now, every day, we are bombarded with an incessant flow of information of which we understand very little and whose filters, if they exist at all, seem highly obscure most of the time.

15. And we experience this in huge transnational communities—which, too, are unconscious. We gather by the millions to watch a TV series, by the tens of millions for election night, by the hundreds of millions for the Olympics, and by the billions for global disasters like the World Trade Centre or the tsunami.

16. It’s very hard to comprehend what is happening to us in the global culture that is gradually taking hold in our minds. We are at a turning point of civilization that is as immeasurable as it is enormous. Clearly, it is harder and harder to decode the collective unconscious that is taking hold.

17. We must not forget the evolution of audiovisual language itself, which is changing and being recodified at an astonishing pace.

18. So why talk about it? Perhaps for our own mental health, in order to better delineate the successes and failures that our projects encounter and better understand the dynamic in which we live. In that, we can find consolation for our woes and remain modest in our small triumphs.

19. As well, to try and find a personal code of conduct in the professional activity we pursue as filmmakers. What I draw from this is a deeper concern with listening to my community and my peers, with welcoming more openly the criticisms and resistances that I am inevitably faced with in abundance.

20. To try and be more keenly aware of the encouragements and opportunities that come my way, to accept that energies other than my own flow into the lakes I dream of creating. To continue to try and help others, in turn, with the projects that mean a lot to them.

21. And finally, to find a little peace and even greater pleasure at the realization that my path as a filmmaker is a fragment of a much larger pattern than that which I am aware of.

22. All this may seem not very combative to you. That is not because I believe that struggle, strategies and demands are useless or irrelevant to this collective dialogue. It seems to me that to make a film today, you need a lot of courage—the courage to dare talk about what you really car about and to persist over a long period of time. I would have liked to talk also about the ageism I have been bumping up against in the past few years, about the increasing competitiveness within which my own practice must find its way, about the uncertainties imposed by the digital explosion on all my future projects. But I’m sure many other people will cover those questions today and I don’t want to take too much of your time.

Thank you for your attention.

Fernand Dansereau
November 10, 2006