The Animated World is a regular feature spotlighting animation from around the globe.
Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s Archipel (Archipelago) is a complex and radiant meditation on the intimate and social territories we all inhabit. Premiering at the 50th International Film Festival Rotterdam, it is a rich film that rewards multiple viewings. A poetic essay loosely structured around the metaphor of the archipelago, it combines documentation with imagination as it sifts through Québécois history and images, pondering the ways in which real events are shaped by individual perspectives, desires, and expectations. Focusing in large part on the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the film mulls over the secularization, modernization and separatist activism of the period through the use of dialogue, archival footage, and a dynamic range of animated styles that both visualize and deconstruct these ideas. The film progresses as a meandering journey through the Hochelaga Archipelago in the St. Lawrence River before reaching the Atlantic Ocean, and moves backward and forward in time. This can be disorienting at moments, but it is also intriguing, revealing, and enchanting.
Archipel is large—it contains multitudes—to paraphrase Walt Whitman in Song of Myself, a poem that also sought to resolve individual and collective destinies in a freewheeling and euphoric manner. Dufour-Laperrière mentioned in the virtual Q&A (Afterthoughts) accompanying the IFFR screening that his approach while developing the film was to seek and invent images, and to let his animation team develop different sections organically and separately. The result is a movie that wears its pleasure of invention on its sleeve, even when delving into darker moments, with the true feel of an archipelago. The film is a moving collage of styles and representational strategies: drawing, photographs, live action, stop motion, film footage overlaid with painted animation, 2D digital animation resembling color fields, and more. The harmony between visual styles, narrative arc, spatial journey, and thought process is thus seamless.
Territory is animated in a number of ways in the film—most evocatively through the figure of a woman, whose body is drawn onto landscapes and archival images, containing and transforming them. The film begins with her image in a reverse silhouette—her outline contains a view looking out at the St. Lawrence River—an islet of color amidst a black screen. This introduces the visual metaphor for the film and its approach to the subject, merging personal, intimate, even imagined spaces with the larger social and natural world. In the first iteration of this, the sea fills the top half and a grassy cliff the bottom with a precipice cleanly dividing them in two. In a similar way, the leap between personal and social vision is abrupt but also connected. Throughout the film, the St. Lawrence River divides the islands from each other while also unifying them. The maps that are featured help expand and shift our understanding of these insular maritime territories and how the logic of the archipelago informs the unique political and linguistic identity of Quebec.
A philosophical dialogue permeates the film, providing a further framework and metaphor. Spoken by actors Florence Blain Mbaye and Mattis Savard-Verhoeven, it questions identity, existence, presence, and perspective while providing a guide, even if “capricious,” to the film’s casual flânerie through space and time. While the man repeatedly insists she does not exist, the woman—whose outline we see throughout the film—critiques his claims and provides most of the commentary and reflection in the film. She is an embodiment of the intimate and symbolic relationship we all develop inside ourselves to the rest of the world, and perhaps she is the rest of the world as well. It brings to mind the work of Marguerite Duras and Chris Marker, and Archipel continues in their tradition of conveying complex ideas through the juxtaposition of imagery and words. Duras’ script for Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) questions national identities and geography through conversation in a similar way, and Marker’s exploration of memory and history as both personal and global phenomena in Sans Soleil (1983) limns a parallel dichotomy.
The voiceover dialogue between the two narrators represents the importance of conversation in the role of nation building and collective reality, as do the references to multiple writers. Dufour-Laperrière also used a conversation to steer his previous animated film—Ville Neuve (2018) is set during the 1995 Quebec independence referendum, whose extremely close result (barely over 50%) rejected Québécois sovereignty, with 93% of the population voting. Archipel moves further into Quebec’s past, conversing with archival documentaries and writers and activists from the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Two such are Jacques Ferron, a “tender” doctor and writer, and Pierre Vallières, a “bitter” writer and activist—two faces of sovereignty politics and the modernity that enveloped Quebec in mid-century. The film tells us: “Their rebellions were parallel, complementary… Both straining against reality”—a duality of approach with a joint purpose. The images in this section are dark and constantly mutating in the rain as the land shifts and rolls—not quite land, not quite water—depicting the turmoil of the period, and the struggle of individuals seeking to rise out of and transform the social world.
Other writers haunt the film: Hubert Aquin, Gaston Miron, Joséphine Bacon. Dufour-Laperrière has noted that the experimental documentary by Simon Beaulieu, Miron, un homme revenu d’en dehors du monde (2014) was influential to the approach of his film. Miron marries the work of national poet Gaston Miron with archival film, reflecting on the union of personal and political destinies in Quebec. Aquin’s work La fatigue culturelle du Canada français is dramatized in Archipel as a fight between a mythical wolf and serpent. This section is animated with finely drawn white lines on a black background, beautifully dynamic and powerful. Both animals seem to represent the fatigue of resisting assimilation as they ultimately devour and destroy each other. Finally, Innu writer Joséphine Bacon reads her poem “Tshissinuatshitakana” (“Message Sticks”), which suddenly interrupts the Québécois debate, reminding us of other voices, languages, and peoples made unintelligible. The poem emphasizes the fundamental importance of language, remaining untranslated until the end credits, where it can finally be read and understood. These writers provide no clear answers in the film, which instead explores, questions, and contemplates.
While these political and literary figures make cameos, the important filmic precursors Les Îles du Saint-Laurent (1941) and 24 Hours or More (Gilles Groulx; 1973) are more deeply embedded within it. The short documentary Les Îles du Saint-Laurent gives us Quebec on the verge of modernization—part Catholic state full of churches, handcrafting and the cultural legacies of France, part industrialized city (Montréal) and modern commerce. Les Îles documents an earlier world that the animation interacts with, maneuvers, reframes and reinterprets as it clarifies how times have changed. The politically charged documentary 24 Hours or More, filmed only thirty years later, seems light years apart. Dufour-Laperrière stated in Afterthoughts that this film was important for him because its intuitive editing suggested a blueprint for joining together real and mental landscapes. Archipel uses and embellishes on its opening shot of a man riding a train through Montréal as a signpost for the coexistence of inner and outer journeys: while he physically travels by train, his gaze enacts an internal reverie.
The film’s narrative offers a precise but arbitrary structure as it unfolds in diary-form. There is no clear destination with time—we move continually into an uncertain future while experiencing the reverberations of the past. This movement backward and forward in time happens continuously. For example, a map decomposes itself as territories become unnamed, boundaries disappear, and rivers rise; landscapes lose their buildings and revert to wilderness; people long dead are painted out of the picture. Images from the past also expand through the imagination: in a scene from Les Îles, women embroider tapestries—“the true expression of the soul of our people”—amidst an animated overlay that makes them seem to stitch the darkness around them. This image creates a sense of comfort and home, while also emphasizing how irretrievably moored in the past their way of life is.
Other images focus on the “countless anonymous souls” who are gone, charting the loss occasioned by the violence of civilizations as they crowd each other out. This disappearance is marked in different animated styles, perhaps most strikingly in an image of limp bodies ascending into the sky with Montréal as the backdrop. This might be a perspective from the nearby settlement named Assumption (L’Assomption), which references a Catholic concept whose secular meanings are teased out in the film as well. Assumption is portrayed not only as a physical ascension of bodies but as a loss of self through the embrace of larger reality, transcending suburban existence into the infinite sky.
Present day existence also emerges continually throughout the film—both in live action images of a multiethnic city, and in the lively and colorful images that playfully pop up all over the old documentaries. These express the “gaiety of modern life” alluded to in Les Îles, as the figures bustle around, bursting constraints inside and outside of the frame. Language is visualized as well in sparkling letters in the sky and on a church whose name suddenly lights up in festive neon. The “Chic-N-Coop” gives special insight into the strange bedfellows that French and English can concoct together. Besides the city, women also become the focus of generational progress and continuity as we see faces transform while maintaining certain key traits, like the same blue eyes. This continual melding of past and present looks forward as well. The female narrator invites us to participate in this creation of a shared future: “Invent it. Close your eyes. Be quiet. And imagine…. If you stopped talking and listened for once… what might you see?”
With its focus on real and invented geographies and the interface between documentary and animation, Archipel places dialogue at the center of its being. This is the logic, too, of its use of the archipelago as metaphor: it allows for the existence of sovereign islands that also cohere in the collective destiny of a continent. This vision includes “Other, very different islands. Ravishing and picturesque islands. Forgotten islands,” as the woman declares. Islands and ideas appear and disappear from view throughout the film, in somber colors as well as bright abstractions, and affirm a faith in dialogue and hope. In the Afterthought interview, Dufour-Laperrière was asked what gave him greater pleasure: to find an image or create one? His response highlights both the pleasure and the power of Archipel. He revealed that discovering an amazing image necessitates sharing it, to document its (often lost) presence in the world, while bringing a new image to life requires more effort but is equally rewarding. This pleasure in bringing forth new images and discovering and reinterpreting old ones runs through the film like a river, half real, half imagined, and the shift in perspective is mesmerizing.