Michel Audy

male
Born
1947
in
Trois-Rivières
Canada
,
CA
Lives in
Trois-Rivières , QC
Canada
,
Quebec CA
Biography

Director, scriptwriter. One of the pioneers of Québec queer cinema, this Trois-Rivières native started developing ambitious feature projects in 8mm while still a teenaged film club fanatic. With the support of Radio-Canada and the NFB, he went on to his first 16mm feature, Jean-François-Xavier de... (1969), a free-form meditation depicting male and female adolescence in confrontation with the constrictions of family, religion, and, of course, death. The film was notable for its lyrical views of young men in sylvan settings, usually nude—and its struggles with taboo sexual desires through ambivalent symbolism and inarticulate challenges to family and church. Trounced by critics, Audy persisted in 1972, this time in 35mm: Corps et âmes (1971) fared even worse than the previous film, despite Audy’s movement towards a more conventional narrative world of male adolescents ambiguously connected to a single young woman. The film broods about loss, guilt, trauma and death again, but the painful, unreciprocated longing is recognizable to any queer spectator. Undaunted, Audy went on to court personal bankruptcy with yet another feature, La Maison qui empêche de voir la ville (1974), yet another variation on the male-male-female triangle and a downbeat narrative of trauma and memory. Offering a gorgeous hitchhiker and long scenes of unconsummated male intimacy (the guys have to get drunk to put their arms around each other, but their eyes have no such inhibitions), the film scarcely survived its preview screenings.