There is in the cold of Quebec (Canada) this cinematographic freshness which does a lot of good for the French cousins, stuck in their rhetorics. Eric Morin’s work is exhilarating. Throughout The Hunting of Godard by Abbittibbi, there is a restraint which offers the viewer a libertarian vision of the arrival of Jean-Luc Godard in July 1968. The director of Pierrot le fou, then crowned with his radical positions during of the Cannes Film Festival, which with Truffaut had interrupted him in solidarity with « the working world », was invited to a political film festival. We will understand, everything is there. Godard facing the rest of the world? The pretext was too good not to take this idea on the fly and develop it into a fiction. Eric Morin rubs his hands. The guide will be the documentary produced by Julie Perron (bonus) when JLD comes. Why not expose an intellectual figure of cinema to the « rednecks » of the Quebec hinterland. Like a Georges Rouquier, our young videographers clad with imposing material (and yes, portable video already existed in 1968) set off on foggy paths by taking a model from Godard – who already understood all the power and the artistic independence of this new tool. Eric Morin’s film walks between the discovery of an independent media, the relationships of these young people in the aftermath of the fever of 68, the good activist word and this mocking way in which the natives, mischievous in mind, welcome « our militants » Who is the most exotic? So goes the film in its reflection and in its discovery. Strolling between love story and cinematographic reflection (in color and black and white), without forgetting the voiceover, essential to the continual questioning of our young city dwellers facing the world of loggers and other villagers lost in the snow.
This film, released in 2014, is available on DVD from Éditions Montparnasse. To refresh our steamy neurons, nothing beats a good film from La Belle Province. Eric Morin released, in 2019, We are all Gold.