The Cinematheque

“I don’t know what truth is. We can’t think we’re creating truth with a camera. But what we can do is reveal something to viewers that allows them to discover their own truth.”

Michel Brault

Michel Brault (1928–2013) is one of Quebec’s preeminent directors and arguably Canada’s most celebrated cinematographer. He is credited with pioneering the portable, handheld method of photojournalistic camerawork that revolutionized the NFB in the late 1950s and spurred a nonfiction movement in France—under the epithet ​“cinéma vérité”—with the arrival of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s landmark Chronicles of a Summer (1961), for which Brault served as principal cinematographer. After a string of seminal collaborative documentaries in the early 1960s, he left the NFB’s French Program in want of auteurial independence, a decision that coincided with an increasing fascination with the latitudes of narrative filmmaking. (He directed a pair of 30-minute fictional shorts in the leadup to his NFB departure.)

For this year’s edition of National Canadian Film Day, The Cinematheque presents free repertory screenings of the iconic Quebecois filmmaker’s first two fiction features—the underappreciated Between Salt and Sweet Water (1967) and pantheonic Les ordres (1974). Both films will be projected in restorations undertaken by Éléphant, a preservation body devoted to the legacy of Quebec cinema, recently made available through the NFB.