Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960)
1964 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Jacques Godbout
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative
Québec painter Paul-Émile Borduas moves from religious subjects through surrealism and cubism toward stark black-and-white automatist abstraction, tracing the evolution of a leading Canadian modernist.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight biographical survey of a canonized modernist—Godbout's playing it safe, letting the paintings do the work instead of interrogating why we're supposed to care about this particular arc from devotion to abstraction.
Godbout situates Borduas precisely within the modernist genealogy, using the progression of visual styles as a formal argument about artistic rupture and liberation; the restraint of the documentary form itself becomes the counterpoint to the painter's own drift toward abstraction.
The decision to let the paintings breathe in unbroken shots, with minimal archival voiceover, trusts the viewer's eye to trace the evolution—that negative space around the works is where the film actually lives.