13 March 2021

Claude Jutra's Fred Berry comédien | Fred Berry actor (1959)

 

Fred Berry was a famous québécois theatre and film actor for several decades and Claude Jutra was commisssioned to make a documentary on him for NFB's television series Profils et paysages. If it starts in the wings with its subject coming in, if it shows photos and film clips from Fred Berry's life, it strongly digresses from conventional documentaries in another way.

Instead of bringing in friends and colleagues to talk about him or talk with him individually, all the people are invited join him together in the room to talk with him and reminisce in a quite chaotic way: Germaine Giroux, Henri Deyglun, Gratien Gélinas, Ernest and Fanny Tremblay. And there is no life story from beginning to near end, just (often literal) snapshots of his career. Interesting, and this would be a kind of introduction to Jutra's other documentary in the series: on Félix Leclerc.

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