'The Sweater' director uses home movies to craft poignant doc
Marchant describes experience as “a sort of catharsis for me, to get some of these stories off my chest”
Jason Pchajek, staff writer
Time is strange.
It can feel both short and long. Like it passes in a blink, or that there is not enough, or by contrast like it crawls. In the case of Jean-Pierre Marchant, the 48-year difference between himself and his Chilean-immigrant father was – in the director’s words – a “gulf.”
It was this disconnect which inspired his film The Sweater.
Still: The Sweater
Pieced together from hours of home movies, abstract and strange visuals, and Marchant’s own narration, the film is itself a trip through time. It feels like a river of memories, with the audience pulled along in its wake.
“During my early days in Montreal, my South American parents recorded everything,” he said.
“I have finally, after years of putting it off, started to grapple with my family archive of home movies. In going through it all and reflecting on them, I realised that my father’s relationship with me had always been somewhat strained, and I really wanted to know why.
“As part of the process of discovery I started to think about the things that encapsulated our relationship, and this reminded me of the sweater that he had given me a few years before. Since the sweater was the last gift he gave me, I was then able to work backwards from there and pull in the other stories and episodes.
“I’ve continued to make more short films about the subject and hope to have a larger short film completed before next summer.”
The divide between him and his father was large, as many first-generation immigrants can attest. With different cultural backgrounds, different views on the world, on the self, about one’s place in the world, it was natural for that divide to exist. But even Marchant can’t escape the fact that we are shaped by our parents, and reflect them, whether we think about it or not.
“My father was 48 years old when I was born, and we continually struggled, and mostly failed, to bridge the half-century gulf between us,” Marchant said.
“His ideas of fatherhood, success, respectability, and other things were very different from what I grew up to embrace.
“Ultimately, I think parenthood is about inheritances – the things that our parents give us. There were the things that my father consciously imparted to me – a desire for knowledge of the world, a belief in the importance of material comforts and nice things – plus some physical characteristics such as my darker skin.
“His specific viewpoints, shaped by a childhood characterised by extreme poverty, also informed my ideas of what you can and can’t expect to get out of life. The film is a sort of catharsis for me, to get some of these stories off my chest, and I hope viewers will try to identify their own inheritances in their lives.”
Still: The Sweater
This catharsis came hand-in-hand with recollection, as Marchant thought back to his childhood, and the time spent with his father. In one scene, he thinks over an interaction his father had with another man while at work – an event Marchant did not remember at first.
“This was a really powerful memory that I had completely forgotten about until I read historian Carolyn Steedman’s book, Landscape for a Good Woman, which brought it all flooding back,” he said.
“In the book she recalls a story of her working-class father and her when she was a child. They were picking bluebells on private grounds and the groundskeeper came by and shouted at them.
“She writes: ‘My father stood, quite vulnerable in memory now. He was a thin man. I wonder if I remember the waisted and pleated flannel trousers of the early 1950s because in that confrontation he was the loser, feminized, outdone? They made him appear thinner, and because of the way the ground sloped, the forest-keeper, very solid and powerful, was made to appear taller than him…and then we retreated, made our way back down the path, the tweed man the victor, watching our leaving.’
“I think our minds have a funny way of trying to protect us by forgetting or altering things, and in my case it required a lot of introspection to recall details from my childhood. This is also a story about class. It demonstrates that class consciousness is a structure of feeling that is learned in childhood, and it’s really hard to recall those memories. It takes hard work.
“For me anyway.”
All the home recordings and recollections coalesce into an emotional experience, and before you ask, yes, he still has the sweater.
Marchant said, “I can’t throw it away now, although, as you can see in the film, it isn’t very flattering…”