"The Wide-Angle Cinema of Michel Brault"

DOCUMENTARY Michel Brault had already begun making a name for himself as an innovative, new-style documentarian and cinematographer when he signed on to collaborate with Quebec radio personality and oral historian–turned–filmmaker Pierre Perrault. It was Brault who, after visiting Ile-aux-Coudres ("Island of Hazelnuts"), in the lower Saint Lawrence River, suggested they make a straight documentary rather than the neorealist-style drama with nonactors that Perrault had first envisioned. The result, 1963's Pour la Suite du Monde (retitled Of Whales, the Moon and Men for English-speaking markets), wound up one of the most influential and popular films in national (and Quebec nationalist) documentary cinema. At times you might wonder if the residents of Ile-aux-Coudres (which was named by a French explorer in 1535) aren't acting after all — or it is just that their outsize personalities grow even larger while basking in the camera's attention? These people are all loud (the men at least), and they never have an opinion that isn't definitive, even when it changes. They stomp to accordion music, run around like maniacs in Lenten mummer masks, and enthusiastically pursue the one dramatic device the filmmakers introduce: reviving Ile-aux-Coudres' long-abandoned custom of catching white beluga whales using traditional craft and knowledge of tidal currents. Don't worry: The one they capture is delivered, live, to an aquarium. There's something so entrancing about this place and its people that Perrault made two more features about them. These films close, and Of Whales commences, this Pacific Film Archive series, which offers just a sample of the prolific Brault's work over the last five decades: 1967's "direct cinema" exercise Drifting Upstream, which finds a country boy adrift in Montreal, comforted by a very young Genevieve Bujold; and 1974's Orders, a docudrama reenactment of the October Crisis of 1970, a Patriot Act–like moment in Quebec history when the government responded to a radical separatist group's actions by suspending civil rights and arresting citizens at will. Nearly 80, Brault will appear at screenings in conjunction with his current PFA teaching residency. (Dennis Harvey)

THE WIDE-ANGLE CINEMA OF MICHEL BRAULT March 9–26, Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

$4–$8. ( 510) 642-1412, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu