We can’t just wipe filmmaker Claude Jutra’s name from our past
On June 4, the world of Quebec cinema will honour itself on Ici Radio-Canada.
It hasn’t been an easy time. Not that long ago the largest question facing its membership was: What’s a better name for the Quebec film awards prize, LUMI or IRIS? Really. IRIS won, by the way, 65 per cent to 35 per cent. The number of votes cast was not reported.
This name change is the result of a slightly desperate attempt to distance the awards, in fact, all Quebec cinema, from the now infamous name by which they were previously known, les Prix Jutra.
They were named for Claude Jutra, the multi-award-winning director of many films in both English and French, including Mon Oncle Antoine, Kamouraska and Surfacing.
He disappeared one cold winter day in 1986 when he could no longer cope with the onslaught of Alzheimer’s disease. He was found more than a year later in the St. Lawrence River. He was 57. There was a note in his pocket, “Je m’appelle Claude Jutra.”
In January 2016, there were rumblings of a new biography by Yves Lever that threatened to expose Jutra as a child molester.
Jutra was an uncloseted gay man when it was neither fashionable nor without danger. The book finally appeared, to much shock and horror. But also to cries of libel and injustice, as no names were named. Then La Presse printed what became the J-Bomb, a first-person accounting of how Jutra had abused the child of some friends. Later another victim came forward.
It was ugly. No one wants to believe that one of his cultural heroes, certainly one of mine, was capable of horrifying acts that, in at least one case, seem to have destroyed a child’s life.
Then the cookie really crumbled: Hélène David, then Quebec minister of culture, announced that the Quebec film awards could no longer carry the name “Jutra.”
Mayor Denis Coderre ordered that Montreal remove all references to Jutra in its streets and parks.
Québec Cinéma, which oversees the awards, almost went into exile to search its soul.
Even the anglos took a whack. The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television announced that it would no longer call its prize for best first feature film the Claude Jutra Award.
It was a whirlwind of denial, desperation, fear and loathing, a high-horsed self-flagellation exercise that in its singular drive to erase the past ignored the question of revisionism.
We tend to try to live in a world where we can open a little bottle and white out the past.
When I lived in China in the early 1980s after the Cultural Revolution, and especially after the fall of the Gang of Four, you could go into almost any museum and find many contemporary photos had been “revised” in the most obvious ways.
A smiling photo of Chairman Mao and his pal Lin Biao, for example. In 1971, Lin flew off one day and was found some time later in Mongolia, where his plane had crashed. Nobody believed it was an accident; it became known as the “Lin Biao incident.”
The fix: Lin Biao’s head was simply cut out of the picture and the shot put back into the frame, Chairman Mao, complete with his mole, smiling with his arm
No one wants to believe that one of his cultural heroes, certainly one of mine, was capable of horrifying acts that, in at least one case, seem to have destroyed a child’s life.
around a slightly jagged cameo. Of course, it looked awkward and begged the question of who was missing but most people could guess. Chinese visitors didn’t seem to find it peculiar. By then they were well used to revisionism.
We might pride ourselves on being more sophisticated in our revisionism, but it doesn’t address what we do as a society with “the problematic,” particularly artists.
Had Claude Jutra abused my child, I might well have wanted to do something horrible to him, but does that mean we should burn his films? Does he have to be removed from our collective consciousness? Are all of his contributions to be negated and despised, his memory erased with chemical whiteout, the delete button, or even Communist Party scissors?
It might be too soon for an open and frank discussion about Jutra, but it will come. It has to come. We all need to hear it and participate in it. Obviously, it will need to be more than a renaming contest.
In the meantime, at least in my mind, I am putting irises on Claude Jutra’s grave while offering his victims my condolences and respect, along with the hope they can find still more courage and love.