| The
wilderness of "Black Robe" About one hundred miles north of Quebec
City, near Quebec's Saguenay River, you can find the
rugged wilderness so beautifully captured in Bruce
Beresford's 1991 Black Robe, a
film about a Jesuit priest who journeys upriver by canoe
to convert the Huron Indians. Here are some photos from
the movie, which I've inexpertly captured by
photographing my TV.
| The
film's breathtaking scenery. |
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"Of
all the Christian missionaries, the Jesuits were
the most far-ranging and adventuresome. And they
were everywhere, not only in Quebec, but in South
America (see 'The Mission') and Japan (see
'Shogun'). Movies about their exploits tend to
romanticize them, however, and to fit their
actions into the outlines of conventional movie
plots. The reality was no doubt more like 'Black
Robe,' in which lonely men put their lives on the
line in a test of faith, under conditions of
appalling suffering and hardship."
- Roger Ebert reviewing "Black Robe" here.
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| Father
Laforgue (Lothaire Bluteau), lost in the woods, cries
out in Cree, "Is anyone there?" Visit a rudimentary
English-Cree tranlation page here.
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| Canoeing
is, I think, an ideal way to travel. Of course
there's a magazine devoted to the canoer: Canoe & Kayak. |
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| You
might also like to know that "Black
Robe" makes the Astral Research
Organization's Mystical Movie Guide. |
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| Daniel
(Aden Young), rows furiously ahead. |
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| Look at a
close-up map of Quebec's Saguenay River region here. Read
more about the movie in The New Yorker's capsule
review here.
The movie also pops up here
in the relentlessly polemical but apparently
well-researched Fantasies of the Master Race:
Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of
American Indians (by Ward Churchill, in
1998).
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