The Missing Mythology: Barthes in Québec

C I NÉ-D O C U M E NTS
SCOTT MACKENZIE
TH E M I SS I N G MY TH O LO GY:
Bar thes in Québec
Résumé : Cet article, qui introduit la traduction ci-dessous, examine le travail de collaboration de Roland Barthes et Hubert Aquin sur le film Le Sport et les hommes.
En plus de combler une lacune dans l’histore du documentaire à l’ONF/NFB, l’auteur (qui a traduit le texte de Barthes) offre une nouvelle lecture de l’intérêt particulier que Barthes voue au sport-comme-spectacle-filmé.
F
ilm history, like all historical narratives, is filled with gaps and fissures.
Often, though, rediscovering what is elided in film history offers us
greater insight into the concerns of, and trends within, a national cinema.
A re-examination of the French semiotician Roland Barthes’ collaboration
with Québécois filmmakers in the early 1960s provides us with such a case.
Much has been written about the cinéma direct films produced by the
NFB/ONF’s (National Film Board of Canada/Office national du film) l’équipe
française in the 1950s and 1960s and the profound influence these films had
on documentary film practice in France and the United States.1 Much has
also been written about the influence of both la nouvelle vague and French
philosophy—specifically, the advent of structuralism—on Québécois filmmakers during this period. Yet, in spite of the fertile interchanges which
took place between Parisian and Québécois intellectuals and cultural workers, little mention is made of Roland Barthes’ work with the Québécois
writer, broadcaster and filmmaker Hubert Aquin on a film called Le Sport et
les hommes (1961). Passing references, at best, are made to Barthes’ collaboration with Aquin in the key historical surveys of Québécois cinema.2
None of the plethora of biographies and critical studies of Barthes’ work—
including Barthes’ own Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes—mention his time
in Montréal.3 What is perhaps more surprising is that in the career-spanning Œuvres complètes, published between 1993 and 1995, which not only
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES
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brings together Barthes’ collected writings, but also his interviews and even
the plan d’études for his courses, no mention is made of the film.4 Even those
in Québec who know about Barthes’ connection with the NFB/ONF typically refer to his acknowledgement in La lutte (Claude Jutra, Michel Brault,
Marcel Carrière & Claude Fournier, 1961)—a film inspired, in part, by his
essay “Le monde où l’on catche” from Mythologies—and leave his far more
active role in scripting the commentary for Le Sport et les hommes by the
wayside.
As Barthes’ contribution to Québécois cinema is often elided, so is the
film career of Hubert Aquin. While Aquin is known primarily for his
essays, radio broadcasts and fiction, he was employed by the NFB/ONF
from 1960 to 1963, working on seven films during his three year career
there: L’homme vite (dir. Guy Borremans; prod. Aquin, 1960); Le Sport et les
hommes (dir. Aquin, 1961); Le Temps des amours (co-dir. Aquin, 1961); Jour après
jour (dir. Clémont Perron; prod. Aquin, 1962); La fin des étés (dir. Anne-Claire
Poirier; co-script Aquin, 1963); À l’heure de la décolonisation (dir. Monique
Fortier; script Aquin, 1963); and À Saint-Henri, le 5 septembre (dir. Aquin,
1964). He also worked on the translation of English language documentaries produced for the Comparisons series, re-shooting scenes and re- writing
commentaries in French, in order to give the films a Québécois context.
Le Sport et les hommes was the only French film—that is, produced in
French first—to emerge from the Comparisons series. Comprised of nineteen
films produced by the NFB/ONF for broadcast on the CBC and RadioCanada between 1959 and 1964, the series was essentially an attempt at
the cross-cultural analysis of national practices in a comparative context.
Whatever the “practice” under consideration, it was analysed in light of the
national identity of the country in which the activity took place. The role
played by internationalism in this series could be seen as pro-Canadian
propaganda (Canada has a national culture just as India or Germany have
national cultures), but the propagandistic impulse was offset when the
“Canadian” sequences were re-shot in Québec, in French, for broadcast on
Radio-Canada.
In an article about Barthes’ connection with the NFB/ONF, Joyce
Nelson writes the following about the series:
Each production involved on-location shooting in four different
countries; a famous expert in the relevant field scripted the commentary and appeared on-camera for studio sequences which bridged the
location footage. For each film there was a team of at least five
directors and crews, with Ian MacNeill responsible for all the studio
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shooting, and a different director sent to each of the four countries
being compared.5
Commentators employed in the series included anthropologist Margaret
Mead, historian Arnold Toynbee, film producer James Beveridge and poet
and law professor Frank Scott, among others.
After the first four films were shot, the Board’s budget for the series
was nearly depleted.6 Therefore Aquin, who had a life-long passion for
sports, proposed to make the film about the phenomenology of sports out
of stock shots, as the Board could not afford another “prestige” film. In this
way, Aquin could direct a francophone film as a part of the Comparisons
series. In April of 1960, Aquin re-read Barthes’ Mythologies, a text that was
quite influential among Québécois intellectuals at the time.7 He then
approached Barthes in a series of letters. In the first letter to Barthes, dated
April 4, 1960, Aquin writes, “My intention is not to make a film on the history of sport, but rather one on its phenomenology and its poetics.”8 In his
preliminary letter Aquin says that he wishes to address car racing in Italy,
the Tour de France, hockey in Canada, and football in Hungary or bullfights in Spain. Aquin also states that the sports in question are open to
negotiation, which indicates how flexible he was willing to be in order to
get Barthes to work on the film. Aquin did not want Barthes to simply write
a commentary once the film was completed, but to participate in the film
from its conception onward:
If you accept to write a commentary for the final product, [I would
wish] that you participate from the film’s inception, with the orientation of the film when it begins. And here’s how: write to me, when
you can, what you think of this subject overall, of its orientation;
also tell me how you yourself imagine the construction of this film.9
To undertake this work, Aquin offered Barthes “about $250.00” for his initial thoughts on the subject and $1000.00 for the final script, due six to
eight months later. Barthes accepted.10
Aquin wrote Barthes a second letter dated August 3, 1960. In it, he
reiterated that they were not making a film on the history of sports and
that they had agreed to only address “sports-spectacles” and to put aside
atheletics, solitary or Olympic sports. Aquin goes on to discuss Barthes’
suggestion that the film begin with a brief history of sports, an idea that
was dropped from the final film. He then comments on a contentious idea
put forth by Barthes, given his later writings on the photographic image
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and on jouissance. Aquin writes: “You said that there’s no eroticism in sport.
Quite right. On the other hand, in Greece women were banned from the
stadium, and from the Middle Ages until just recently they were singularly absent from sport. The universe of sports is almost exclusively male.”
Indeed, throughout his text, Barthes used only the masculine “homme” or
“hommes” and never the gender-neutral “personne” or “humain.” In relation
to gender-specificity, it is also interesting to note that Aquin ascribes eroticism-as-spectacle solely to the world of the feminine.
Finally, Aquin addresses the role the spectator plays in Barthes’ formulation of the sporting spectacle. He writes:
Coenesthesia. Here is one of the very interesting notions to be
developed in our film. I hope to find adequate footage to illustrate it,
but could you tell me if you plan to discuss this concept at great
length? Do you consider coenesthesia a privileged form of identification between the spectator and the player? If so, this function, if well
illustrated, becomes the occasion we need to talk about the public.
There’s also the `ancient chorus’ aspect of the public: the cries, the
punctuations, the gasps that express the public’s participation in the
spectacle. On this subject, essentially what difference do you see
between the public’s participation in the theatre spectacle and the
sports spectacle? Is there one?11
The ritualized aspect of sports-as-spectacle is developed in the film itself.
A recurring theme of purging violence from society into the spectacle of
sport runs throughout the film. In this way, the film foreshadows the
anthropological theories of scapegoating and mimesis later offered by
René Girard.12
From these epistolary exchanges, the basic trajectory of the film
emerged. Le Sport et les hommes would address the relationship between man
and nature as it is ritualized in sporting contests. The film would also
address the profound investment spectators have in the events unfolding
before their eyes. Le Sport et les hommes, therefore, was an extension of the
kind of cultural semiotics undertaken by Barthes in Mythologies. For Barthes,
the concept of mythical signification—found in everyday objects like
advertisements, popular films, sporting spectacles, and the like—explodes
the traditional binary oppositions which pervade structural semiotics. This
shift, outlined in Mythologies, redefines the sign’s ability to communicate
meaning, as the external and historico-cultural system of signification
overpowers the traditional binary between signifier and signified. Meaning
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then becomes socially negotiated, but not culturally explicit, as there is a
naturalness assumed by the sign which “makes” the reader feel that meaning
is a priori, and not culturally determined.13 Barthes and Aquin applied this
notion of myth to sport, stripping away the ritualized violence in order to
determine its social function. This approach also fit quite well with the kind
of cross-cultural analysis central to the philosophy of the Comparisons series.
Aquin assiduously researched the footage he wanted for his compilation film. He travelled to New York at the end of August 1960 to find stock
footage. He then went to Paris on September 27, 1960 and stayed there
until November 1. During this time, he met with Barthes to discuss the
film. On his way back, he stopped over in London to research stock
footage for the film at the BBC.14 In the final film, stock shots came from
many places, including the BBC in London, NBC in New York, and Leslie
McFarlane’s Here’s Hockey! (NFB, 1953), from the Canada Carries On series.
ASN’s (Associated Screen News) newsreel on the Richard riot at the
Montréal Forum was used in the hockey section and even footage from
Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) was employed as part of the conclusion.
Not one foot of raw stock was exposed in the making of the film.
Barthes arrived in Montréal on January 15, 1961 to work on the film;
he stayed until January 25, 1961. While in Montréal, he was interviewed
on television by Réal Michaud and delivered lectures at Université Laval
and Université de Montréal. Aquin also interviewed Barthes for his radioshow Carrefour, which was broadcast in two parts on February 28 and
March 7.15 Aquin set Barthes up at the Board with a Steenbeck and a copy
of the film. As Nelson notes: “He was presented with a cutting copy of the
film, a shot list with timings for each sequence, and given space at the
Board for multiple viewings.… ”16 From this process, he created his commentary. The film’s producer, Guy Glover, maintains that Barthes could not
demand that parts of the film be re-edited, added or deleted, and therefore
contends that the film itself imposed limitations on Barthes’ analysis.
Nelson notes that an analysis of Le Sport et les hommes “ … might reveal the
visual structure Barthes had to work with—the filmic complications which
placed him at one remove from sport as spectacle as the subject of analysis, and confronted him with filmed spectacle instead.”17 However, as we
have seen, Barthes was very much involved in the structuring of the film
before the editing process began.
It is true, however, that Barthes was not simply writing about sportsas-spectacle, but about sports-as-filmed-spectacle. In this way, both the
spectators on screen and the spectators in the audience were part of the
coenesthetic process. Indeed, this is where Aquin’s interest in sports lay,
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and in his own writing on the phenomenology of sport, he was greatly
influenced by McLuhan’s work on television and film as “cool” and “hot”
media respectively.18
It is also interesting to note that Barthes’ first practical confrontation
with the strengths and limitations of the cinema as a mode of signification
coincided with advances in his intellectual project. In the same year that
Aquin approached the philosopher to write the commentary for Le Sport et
les hommes, Barthes wrote his first serious pieces of film theory, “Le problème
de la signification au cinéma” and “Les « unités traumatiques » au cinéma.”19
These essays combine the cultural semiotics first theorized in Mythologies,
the politique des auteurs found in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma and the research
undertaken by l’Institut de filmologie.20 “La problème de la signification au
cinéma” is an attempt to write a version of “Le mythe, aujourd’hui” for the
cinema, while “Les « unités traumatiques » au cinéma” engages with the
intellectual project of Gilbert Cohen-Séat and the Institut de filmologie. This
points to a major change in his work, at least in regard to the cinema. Up
until this point, Barthes’ writing on film had been limited to reviews of
films by Bresson and Chabrol and to short pieces on iconic actors like
Garbo and Brando for Mythologies.
A few words about the film itself. Le Sport et les hommes was broadcast on
Radio-Canada for the first time on June 1, 1961. It then ran in English as
part of the Comparisons series on the CBC. The English and French language
versions were in distribution until 1977, when Le Sport et les hommes became
an “archival film,” which could only be seen at the NFB/ONF or at the
National Archives in Ottawa.
The film begins with a brief montage of the different sports under
examination—bullfighting, car racing, the Tour de France, hockey and
soccer. Then, a title card appears which reads: “Le Sport et les hommes par
Roland Barthes,” the only credit to appear at the beginning of the film.
While there is not enough space to analyse each of the five segments of
the film, it is worthwhile to make a few preliminary comments about
Barthes’ analysis: one in regard to the Tour de France and another in regard
to Canadian hockey. These two sections give us a good indication of the
types of semiotic and cultural analysis found in the film.
By far, the longest sequence of the film deals with the Tour de
France—a subject Barthes had already written about in Mythologies. In his
essay, “Le Tour de France comme épopée,” Barthes writes: “The Tour thus
possesses a veritable Homeric geography. As in the Odyssey, the race is
here both a periplus of ordeals and a total exploration of the earth’s limits.”21 In many ways, this brief passage summarizes both Barthes’ vision of
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the Tour de France and of sports as a whole: in both the aforementioned
essay and the film, Barthes continuously returns to the notion of man overcoming the “resistance of things.” Indeed, a similar observation is present
in the film, when Barthes states:
It is these excesses, or worse still their contrasts, that the racer has
to fight against by continued, inflexible effort. The resistance of the
earth has to be added to the resistance of things. The severest test
set by nature for the cyclist is the mountain. The mountain—that is
to say, gravity. To conquer the steep slope and the weight of matter
is to assert that man is capable of controlling the whole physical universe. But this conquest is such a difficult one that man must throw
his whole self into the task. This is why—as the whole country
knows—the mountainous stretches are the key to the Tour; not so
much because they decide the winner, but because they clearly manifest the true nature of what is at stake, the spirit of the contest, the
virtues of the contestant. The end of the mountain stretch is therefore the epitome of the whole human adventure.
In the case of Canada, it is the weather itself which, Barthes posits, one
must overcome and turn into sport. Out of all five sports, it seems that
hockey is the one which Barthes understands the least—it is also the sport
that has lent itself most often to the cinemas of Québec and Canada.
Hockey films have been a staple of Canadian and Québécois cinema since
the days of the actualités, produced in nearly every style and genre imaginable, including animated films such as Sheldon Cohen’s The Sweater (1980),
documentaries such as Gilles Groulx’s Un jeu si simple (1964), experimental
films like William Canning’s Blades and Brass (1967) and Bill Wees’ La Première
Étoile/The First Star (1973) and fiction films, such as Michel Brault’s contribution to the omnibus film Montréal vu par … (Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand,
Patricia Rozema, Jacques Leduc, Léa Pool & Michel Brault, 1992). Unlike
the point of view taken by most of the preceding filmmakers, the vision of
hockey offered by Barthes emphasizes its violence. Barthes considers
hockey a sport where the symbolic battles between teams can quickly turn
into real violence between the players and, in the case of the Richard riots,
violence on the part of the spectators. What is interesting about this
approach to hockey is that the analysis offered by Barthes as to the ritualized nature of the violence in hockey and how it can spill over into the
world of the spectators became a guiding theme in the films of l’équipe
française. Similar to Le Sport et les hommes and the ethnographic films of Jean
CJ FS / RCEC 71
Rouch, such as Les Maîtres fous (1954), the sports films of l’équipe française
went on to explore the relationship between ritual practices, the maintenance of community, and the processes of scapegoating and mimesis in
Québécois culture. La lutte (1961), Groulx’s Golden Gloves (1961) and Un jeu
si simple (1964) and Gilles Carle’s Patinoire (1962) all, to differing degrees,
address themselves to these issues. This, as much as the work he did on Le
Sport et les hommes and La lutte, is Barthes’ legacy to Québécois cinema.
Finally, a note on the translation. As Mette Hjort writes in regard to
the work of the translator: “If we speak of a translator’s preface or afterword
as a genre or type of discourse, such rhetorical devices as apology, selfdenigration, and dichologia (excusing failure by pointing to its necessity)
would have to figure among the defining criteria.”22 I certainly feel the
need to engage in dichologia in regard to translating the work of Barthes.
Joyce Nelson notes that “Robert Russell translated from Barthes’ French, a
task which Glover recognized as being `almost impossible because of
Barthes’ richly nuanced style.’”23 In many ways, this is true. Nevertheless, I
have endeavoured to translate this “untranslatable” text, balancing the
metaphors of Barthes with the demands of the English language. In undertaking this translation, I consulted Barthes’ script, the original film, the
English version of the film (the translation of which is quite different from
Barthes’ script) and a post-production translation of the script done for
Grant McLean. I have used all these texts as resources, but have tried to
retain the integrity and spirit of Barthes’ script, to hold on to “the grain of
the voice.” For instance, in both the French and English versions of the
film, the commentary contains a few lines not present in Barthes’ script. As
there is no textual indication that Barthes provided or even approved of
these additions, I have left them out of the translation.
There is a school of thought that believes translations of texts such as
this one are doomed; others believe that the signifying practices of other
languages can be translated, if context-specificity is maintained. Hjort
astutely outlines the positions of these two camps: “Where the idealist tradition projects transparency and the possibility of an exact mirroring of
terms, the skeptical tradition sees opacity and the efficacy of a productive
subjectivity and language.”24 These problems come to the forefront when
translating the work of someone who wrote and thought as much about
language and its signification as Barthes did. In the end, though, I must side
with the notion that translation is possible, even if transparency is not.
Like stripping away the “naturalness” of signs which guided Barthes’ project, translation can be seen as a means of bringing to light the signifying
practices which often lay behind the opacity of language.
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Notes
My thanks to André Loiselle for suggesting many helpful ways to improve the translation
of Barthes’ text, and to Bernard Lutz, the National Film Board of Canada’s printed document archivist, for kindly granting permission for the script of Le Sport et les hommes to
appear in these pages.
1. See, for example, Eric Rohmer and Louis Marcorelles, “Entretien avec Jean Rouch,”
Cahiers du cinéma 144 (1963): 1-22 and Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary” in Bill
Nichols, ed. Movies and Methods. vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985):
258-273.
2. For instance, no mention of their collaboration is made in Gary Evans, In the National
Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada 1949-1989 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1991), Yves Lever, Histoire générale du cinéma au Québec.
rev. ed. (Montréal: Boréal, 1995), or Pierre Véronneau, Résistance et affirmation: la production francophone à l’ONF 1939-1964. Les dossiers de la cinémathèque 17
(Montréal: Cinémathèque québécoise/Musée du cinéma, 1987). One short article on
Barthes’ time in Canada was published in Cinema Canada. See Joyce Nelson, “Roland
Barthes and the NFB Connection,” Cinema Canada 42 (1977): 14-15.
3. See, for example: Stephen Heath, Vertige du déplacement: Lecture de Barthes (Paris:
Fayard, 1974); Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes (London: Oxford University Press, 1983);
Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes 1915-1980 (Paris: Flammarion, 1990); and Roland
Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
4. See Roland Barthes, Œuvres complètes: Tome I 1942-1965. Éric Marty, ed. (Paris: Seuil,
1993).
5. Nelson, 14.
6. Nelson, 14.
7. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). Translated as Roland Barthes,
Mythologies. trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973).
8. Aquin’s letter to Barthes, 4 April 1960. NFB/ONF production file: Le Sport et les
hommes. Reprinted in Hubert Aquin, Journal 1948-1971 (Montréal: Éditions BQ, 1992):
364-365. All translations from Aquin are mine.
9. Aquin, 365.
10. Barthes wrote two letters to Aquin, dated 15 September 1960 and 15 October 1960.
Unfortunately, neither of these letters are in the NFB/ONF production file.
11. Aquin’s letter to Barthes, 3 August 1960. NFB/ONF production file: Le Sport et les
hommes. Reprinted in Hubert Aquin, Journal, 366-367.
12. See René Girard, La Violence et la sacré (Paris: Éditions Bernard Gasset, 1972).
13. See Roland Barthes, “Le mythe, aujourd’hui” in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957): 191247. Translated as Roland Barthes, “Myth Today” in Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973):
109- 159.
14. Aquin’s itinerary can be found in Guy Massoutre, Itinéraires d’Hubert Aquin (Montréal:
Éditions BQ, 1992).
15. Massoutre, 119.
16. Nelson, 14-15.
17. Nelson, 15.
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18. See Hubert Aquin, “Éléments pour une phénoménologie du sport” in Aquin, Blocs
Erratiques: Textes 1948-1977. René Lapierre, ed. (Montréal: Éditions Quinze, 1977): 167-177.
19. Roland Barthes, “Le problème de la signification au cinéma,” Revue internationale de filmologie 10.32/33 (1960) and Barthes, “Les «unités traumatiques» au cinéma,” Revue
internationale de filmologie 10.34 (1960).
20. Major figures in l’Institut de filmologie included Gilbert Cohen-Séat and Henri Agel. See
Gilbert Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma. rev. ed. (Paris:
PUF, 1958) and Étienne Souriau, ed. L’univers filmique (Paris: Flammarion, 1953).
21. Roland Barthes, “Le Tour de France comme épopée” in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957):
114. Translated as “The Tour de France as Epic” in Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower
and Other Mythologies. trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday, 1979): 82.
22. Mette Hjort, “Afterword: Portrait of the Translator” in Louis Marin, Food for Thought.
trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989): 243.
23. Nelson, 15.
24. Hjort, 246.
SCOTT MACKENZIE is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of
Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, where
he teaches Canadian and Québécois cinema. His most recent articles
have appeared in The Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Public.
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