The remarkable and oft misunderstood Claude Jutra, often dubbed “Canada’s Truffaut,” occupies a vital and complex position in the history of Canadian, and Quebec, cinema. He wrote and directed almost 30 film and television productions including Mon Oncle Antoine, considered by many to be the greatest Canadian film ever made. Two years later he directed Kamouraska, the most expensive. A string of commercial and critical failures “exiled” him to English Canada, where he adapted works by Margaret Atwood and Margaret Gibson. He committed suicide in 1986. Since 1993, the Directors Guild of Canada has annually bestowed the Claude Jutra Award upon the best director of a first feature.

Sadly, but hardly surprisingly, Jutra remains little known to the Canadian public. This despite a critically heralded re-release of Mon Oncle Antoine in 1997, and the inclusion of the film in a set of stamps honouring Canadian cinema. One can only hope that Claude Jutra: Filmmaker, the first major study of the director, will remedy the situation, even if only slightly.

Jim Leach, a professor of film and communications at Brock University, has written a loving and lucid study of Jutra’s work, situating it in its cultural, historical, and political contexts while simultaneously offering detailed textual readings of each film. Eschewing a strictly biographical approach, Leach chooses instead to focus on how and why Jutra’s checkered career was inextricably tied to the progression (and frequent regressions) of the Canadian film industry as a whole.

While Leach’s analysis of the films does not address the specifically cinematic (lighting, camera movement, cutting) as rigorously as he does the more literary aspects of theme, character, and symbol, his readings are always exhaustive and engaging. He restores to much of Jutra’s work the nuance and intelligence ignored by previous critics overwhelmed by ideology and fashion. This is an accessible, and essential, exploration of one of our most enduring artists.