The Beluga Triangle: Pour la suite du monde (1962), New Quebec Cinema, and the urban/rural dialectic

One of the most celebrated documentaries to emerge from Quebec during the 1960s was Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault’s cinéma vécu classic Pour la suite du monde (1962). This intimate portrait of life on Île-aux-Coudres, an island in Eastern Quebec that sits in the Saint Lawrence River, is generally understood as a work of salvage ethnography. The filmmakers encouraged the island’s inhabitants to take up traditional practices that had long fallen by the wayside and had to be learned from the community’s elders: the hunt of the beluga whale. I’d like to reconsider this film as a work that is not only based on a dialectical tension between the city and the country, but also on tensions between three island formations: Île aux Coudres, Montreal, and New York City. The Montreal connection had to do with the project’s filmmakers and the studio that produced it, while New York came into play late in the film when a beluga whale was transferred to the New York Aquarium. Among other concerns, the foundational myths of all three islands are based on stories of First Contact between European settlers and Indigenous peoples, and, thus, this aspect of Perrault’s film is intensified if we take this approach.