Pour la suite du monde · 1963 · Pierre Perrault & Michel Brault / 皮埃尔·佩罗、米歇尔·布罗
Pour la suite du monde: How a ‘We’ Is Filmed into Existence
Oral memory, the beluga hunt, fabulation, and a people to come
The film places community inside a process of becoming: memory becomes speech; speech enters budgets, tides, posts, the result of the hunt, and delegation; a collective position capable of saying ‘we’ takes form.
Cinema 2 directly treats Perrault under fabulation in chapter 6 and analyzes this film’s storytelling speech-act in chapter 8. The ten scene windows and visible and audible facts were verified scene by scene; the theoretical links are established through this site's shot-by-shot analysis.
Primary passages and argumentative function
DELEUZE PRIMARY TEXTBoth communicate in the invention of a people.
DELEUZE PRIMARY TEXTa speech-act
DELEUZE PRIMARY TEXTLa fabulation, c’est quoi ? C’est l’appel à son peuple.
SITE FILM ARGUMENT
Oral memory first restores the conditions of action
Preparation, the low-tide rule, and public mobilization form one chain: memory acquires a present tense in speech, and speech convenes those who will enact it.
Preparations for the beluga hunt begin with a riverside discussion.
Open video position
The elders restate the rule that the work must follow low tide.
Open video position
The shared project reaches islanders through face-to-face explanation.
Open video positionThe riverside discussion at 00:10:00 does not display a ready-made technique. The hunt has been suspended for years; posts, tides, and divisions of labour remain dispersed across elders’ bodily memory and speech. At 00:15:00 the rule of working at low tide is spoken again, reconnecting natural rhythm to human action. By 00:20:00 the addressee expands from a few knowledgeable men to the island, and recollection becomes a public proposition that can receive a response.[8][11]
Deleuze calls this relation a word in act. Its force lies not in supplying background information but in changing the positions of speaker and addressee: those who remember become transmitters, those who hear become potential participants, and the filmmakers enter the event as intercessors rather than detached observers. Froger’s account of community adds that cinema does not simply represent an existing bond; the bond is tested and produced through filming, response, and shared obligation.[1][6][4]
SITE FILM ARGUMENT
Fabulation passes through budgets, equipment, and bodily labour
Budget calculations, the transmission of a hunter’s role, and setting posts in the tide show that story becomes a generator of action only by entering material organization.
The meeting translates the hunt into financing and equipment.
Open video position
An elder explains how a hunter must outwit the whale.
Open video position
Deliberation, roles, and materials become shared construction in the water.
Open video positionThe meeting at 00:25:00 presses the revival into unit prices, financing, and equipment. At 00:35:00 an elder uses gesture, exaggeration, and practical language to shape the role of the hunter. Between 00:43:35 and 00:44:13 islanders stand knee-deep in the tide adjusting post spacing. Together the scenes show fabulation not as an escape from reality but as the conversion of an unrealized project into relations that can be costed, taught, and coordinated.[1][11]
Cinema 2 calls the film’s storytelling speech-act a generator of action. Action has not vanished; rather, its causal chain must first be rebuilt by collective enunciation. Bogue describes Perrault and the islanders as reciprocal intercessors: Perrault needs their local knowledge and voices, while filming helps them organize memory into a present undertaking. Construction is therefore repetition with difference. An older practice returns but becomes something new within an environment composed of camera, finance, and public institutions.[1][4][8]
SITE FILM ARGUMENT
Attribution of origin remains contested and unresolved
The boat narrative and workshop debate preserve the community’s production of origin stories rather than deliver a historical answer adjudicated by the film.
The river journey unfolds alongside a story about the hunt's origin.
Open video position
The origin of the post structure remains unsettled in a workshop exchange.
Open video positionAt 00:30:00 participants attribute the post-weir technique to Indigenous inhabitants before the settlers; at 01:10:00 the workshop exchange continues by asking how Indigenous people obtained the idea. Kinik records another account in the film linking the structure to settlers from Brittany and Normandy. Moussette, p. 93, places island oral tradition beside Casgrain’s objection and finds no surviving document that establishes the structure’s origin. The film establishes a conflict of attribution; it does not adjudicate the inventor.[11][7][9][10]
Freire situates Perrault within an anthropology of memory: gesture and speech are staged by the filming situation without making the participants unreal. Beaulieu adds that Perrault’s légender belongs to a specific Québécois politics and poetics that cannot be exhausted by an imported philosophical category. The film works in this tension: local speech produces community while retaining the factual boundary that speech alone cannot establish historical truth.[7][5][9]
SITE FILM ARGUMENT
Shared result and delegation establish a plural speaking position
The captured result gives shared labour a visible consequence, and delegation gives an individual voice plural standing; a people appears as a traceable relation rather than a homogeneous totality.
Islanders gather around the result of the hunt as collective labour gains a visible consequence.
Open video position
The group delegates one member to speak for them inside an institutional setting.
Open video positionAt 01:30:00 islanders gather around the captured beluga as it is prepared for transport; collective labour has produced a visible result. At 01:40:00, the aquarium request ‘you speak for us’ explicitly places one voice in the position of group representative. The first establishes a shared consequence; the second is the directly identifiable speech-act. Collective enunciation does not require everyone to speak at once; authorization, circulation, and consequence must remain traceable in the image.[1][11]
Deleuze’s invention of a people takes concrete form here. Kinship, local knowledge, collective labour, a national film institution, and the aquarium meet, while no single subject owns the event. Froger’s community-under-trial is equally visible: the collective gains visibility through external relations and continues to face representation, institutional dependence, and internal difference. The people to come is thus an unfinished temporal structure—already appearing in action and speech, never frozen as a final identity.[1][6][5]
How scholarship advances the film
Ronald Bogue
Bogue uses intercessors to explain the reciprocal dependence of Perrault and the islanders, situating the film within fabulation and the invention of social collectivity.
- Use for this film
- Connect filmmaker, participant, speech, and action, explaining why construction belongs to the fabulatory process.
- Critical pressure
- A people must be demonstrated through concrete reciprocal dependence rather than used as an abstract political noun.
Marion Froger
Froger understands cinema as a site where communal bonds are tested and produced, making incompletion a formal problem.
- Use for this film
- Explain why the film sustains deliberation, disagreement, institutions, and delegation rather than centring only the captured beluga.
- Critical pressure
- Failure, difference, and external dependence must enter analysis alongside moments of solidarity.
Alain Beaulieu
Beaulieu reconstructs the Québec encounter between Perrault and Deleuze and returns fabulation to the cultural politics following the Quiet Revolution.
- Use for this film
- Read the revived hunt as the differentiated actualization of tradition and the recovery of a suppressed capacity to imagine and speak.
- Critical pressure
- Perrault’s légender retains its own poetic genealogy; Deleuze’s concept enters a powerful dialogue rather than replacing it.
Marcius Freire
Freire compares Perrault and Rouch through an anthropology of memory, stressing how real participants, gesture, speech, and filming situation compose the event.
- Use for this film
- Support a joint reading of disputed origins and bodily labour.
- Critical pressure
- The staging of the filming situation must enter the factual account; participant speech is not an unmediated natural voice.
Anthony Kinik
Kinik directly analyzes the workshop origin dispute, absent Indigenous presence, and the circulation among Île-aux-Coudres, Montréal, and the New York aquarium.
- Use for this film
- Bound the origin narrative and place final delegation within a larger institutional geography.
- Critical pressure
- The formation of collective speech must be tracked together with positions excluded from it.
Limits of the argument
- 01
A speech-act is established by changes in who participates, how action proceeds, and who can represent the collective.
- 02
Fabulation is tested through material reality: tide, finance, posts, and bodily labour determine whether the project takes form.
- 03
A people to come appears as an unfinished collective position; disagreement, external institutions, and representation belong to its structure.
- 04
Origin claims in the film record acts of narration; their historical truth is established separately through Indigenous knowledge and archival research.
References
- 01Open source
PRIMARY THEORY Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), ch. 6, pp. 150–153; ch. 8, pp. 221–224.
Chapter 6, pp. 150–153; chapter 8, pp. 221–224Publisher record - 02Edition collation record
PRIMARY THEORY Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Xie Qiang, Cai Ruoming, and Ma Yue (Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2004), ch. 6, pp. 237–240; ch. 8, pp. 350–354.
Chapter 6, print pp. 237–240 / PDF 248–251; chapter 8, print pp. 350–354 / PDF 361–365Page locators checked against the user-provided scan of the formally published Chinese edition; no file download is provided - 03Open source
PRIMARY THEORY Gilles Deleuze, “Cinema and Thought 12,” 5 February 1985, The Deleuze Seminars, Purdue University.
Approx. 114:00, fabulation as a call to a peopleOpen audio, French transcript, and English translation - 04Open source
SCHOLARSHIP Ronald Bogue, “The Concept of Fabulation,” in Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 14–48.
Chapter 1, pp. 14–48, especially pp. 18–19Publisher chapter; preview available · DOI 10.1515/9780748641758-003 - 05Open source
SCHOLARSHIP Alain Beaulieu, “Gilles Deleuze au Québec,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie 63.2 (2024): 375–396.
pp. 375–396Peer-reviewed; Cambridge Core full-text gateway · DOI 10.1017/S0012217324000313 - 06Open source
SCHOLARSHIP Marion Froger, Le cinéma à l’épreuve de la communauté (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2010).
Open full text on OpenEdition - 07Open source
SCHOLARSHIP Marcius Freire, “Perrault, Rouch: slippages between ‘direct cinema/cinéma-vérité’ and ‘lived cinema’,” Significação 39.38 (2012): 27–39.
pp. 27–39Open peer-reviewed article · DOI 10.11606/issn.2316-7114.sig.2012.71137 - 08Open source
SCHOLARSHIP Séverine Graff, “La construction en France du cinéma direct canadien,” in Le cinéma-vérité: films et controverses (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014).
Full text on OpenEdition - 09Open source
SCHOLARSHIP Anthony Kinik, “The Beluga Triangle: Pour la suite du monde (1962), New Quebec Cinema, and the urban/rural dialectic,” Shima 18.2 (2024): 21–32.
pp. 21–32Open peer-reviewed article · DOI 10.21463/shima.234 - 10Open source
SCHOLARSHIP Marcel Moussette, Fishing Methods Used in the St. Lawrence River and Gulf, Parks Canada History and Archaeology 22 (1979), p. 93.
p. 93, oral tradition and documentary limits concerning the origin of the post weirOpen Government of Canada PDF - 11Open source
FILM SOURCE Michel Brault, Marcel Carrière, and Pierre Perrault, Pour la suite du monde (National Film Board of Canada, 1963), official English-subtitled version.
Official NFB full-film stream