We Are All... Picasso!
1969 · 58m · Canada
Directed by Jacques Giraldeau
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Painters and sculptors in late-1960s Quebec discuss their practice, art's social role, and the province's surge of interest in contemporary work. Museum directors, critics, and members of the public add conflicting views, including unease with modern forms.
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A 58-minute roundtable on art's social function sounds like every tedious panel discussion ever filmed—and yet Giraldeau refuses to settle the argument, letting genuine unease about modernism stand unresolved alongside genuine conviction, which is genuinely perverse for a NFB doc of this era.
This is essential post-war documentary form: the essay film as dialectical space, where institutional voices, artistic conviction, and public skepticism collide without synthesis—a rigorous engagement with art's legitimacy question that recalls Marker's structural precision and positions itself squarely in the Quebec modernist moment.
The unmissable move is letting the doubt win—Giraldeau keeps the camera on confused or hostile faces in the crowd rather than cutting to the artists' reassurances, and that single editorial discipline transforms a talking-heads film into something that actually *feels* the friction between avant-garde ambition and lived community resistance.