Jean-Claude Labrecque

Jean-Claude Labrecque

Labrecque began his career at age 18, at the Office National du Film du Québec, where he learned the basics of filmmaking. He then went on to work for the National Film Board of Canada. Once he had learned his trade, he quickly became much in demand as a talented cinematographer, working on a number of major productions. He worked with Claude Jutra on his 1963 film À tout prendre puis, with Gilles Groulx on his 1964 film Le chat dans le sac and with Gilles Carle on his 1965 film La vie heureuse de Léopold Z. Also in 1965, Labrecque earned his first credit as a director, with the release of 60 Cycles, a documentary short film about the Tour Saint-Laurent, a long-distance bicycle race on Québec’s Gaspé peninsula.

Over a career spanning more than 40 years, Labrecque has built an impressive filmography, including some 40 films as director and another 20 as co-director, along with three television series. The consistent theme running through all these works, and the passionate focus of his career, has been Québec’s culture and society at significant moments in its history, such as Charles de Gaulle’s visit in 1967 (La visite du Général de Gaulle au Québec) and the Montréal Olympics in 1976 (Jeux de la XXIe Olympiade/Games of the XXI Olympiad, an NFB production that Labrecque co-directed).

In 1970, 1980 and 1991, Labrecque co-directed three films with Jean-Pierre Masse, in which Québec poets talk about a seminal event in Québec’s literary history: the famous Nuit de la poésie (night of poetry) in 1970.

Labrecque’s fiction films also address his primary concern of being a witness to his times. Examples include Les Smattes (1972), about the government-ordered closing of a village on the Gaspé peninsula, and Les vautours (1975) and et Les années de rêve (1984), whose story lines run from the end of the reign of Québec premier Maurice Duplessis in 1959 to the October Crisis of 1970.

Some years later, Labrecque evoked Québec cultural life in the middle and late 20th century in documentaries such as 67 Bis, boulevard Lannes (1990), about the year that Québec songwriter Claude Léveillée spent working with Édith Piaf in Paris; André Mathieu, musicien (1993), about Québec pianist and composer André Mathieu; and L'aventure des compagnons de Saint-Laurent, about the early days of a Québec theatre company founded by Émile Legault, a Catholic priest, theatre director, and playwright, in the 1950s.

In 2002, Labrecque directed RIN, a hard-hitting documentary about Québec’s first sovereigntist political party, the Rassemblement pour l'Indépendance Nationale, which operated from 1960 to 1968.

In 2003, when Québec premier Bernard Landry began travelling across the province in the general election campaign that ended with the bitter defeat of his Parti Québecois government, Labrecque decided to follow and film him. The result was the documentary À hauteur d'homme, a clear-eyed portrait of this politician with his passions, his sense of humour and his dignity in defeat.

Another milestone in Labrecque’s career was Félix (2010), a spectacular documentary that he had always dreamed of making, in which Québec’s great national poet Félix Leclerc talks about himself and his life with disarming simplicity.

A passionate fan of films and everything about them, Labrecque served as president of the Cinémathèque Québécoise from 1976 to 1978 and of the Rendez-vous du Cinéma Québécois film festival from 1991 to 1993. He also served on the board of directors of the Jutra Awards from 2001 to 2004.

Awards and Honours

Jean-Claude Labrecque has received many awards and honours for his work. His first documentary, 60 Cycles, released in 1965, took the award for Best Short Film at the Moscow International Film Festival. In 1992, Labrecque received the Government of Québec’s Albert Tessier Prize for his lifetime achievements in film. In 2004, his film about Bernard Landry, À hauteur d'homme, received the Jutra Award for Best Documentary.

In 2001, Labrecque’s son Jérôme released Jean-Claude Labrecque, cinéaste du contemporain, a documentary about his father’s remarkable life and career, letting audiences witness the passion that marked them both.

With his talent for capturing the texture of real life and communicating it in both documentary and fiction films, Jean-Claude Labrecque has given audiences a vivid portrait of the politics and history of modern Québec.