This thesis combines the concept of autoethnography with recent research that has linked orality and the development of Quebec cinema. It focuses on the historical desire for self-representation that preoccupied Quebec filmmakers before the institutionalization of Quebec cinema as a culture industry in the 1970s, and underlines a corresponding genealogy of films centered on the filmmaker’s presence and first-person discourse. In a handful of foundational films starting with those of Albert Tessier, and moving to the work of Claude Jutra, Gilles Groulx and Anne-Claire Poirier, the thesis argues that the filmmaker’s subjectivity embodies the Quebecois community which is made “other” within the space of Canadian and global cinema. The mediation of autobiographical traces conceives film as a “living experience” of culture and identity, embodied in the filmmaker’s own body and/or voice. I argue that autoethnographic expression is closely tied to the building of Quebec’s national cinema, as a discursive practice emphasizing agency, perspective, and the right to self-representation. Yet, the genealogical approach of the thesis also observes how this mediation of individual identity complicates collective identity in the process. The nation is rendered a site of competing experiences and perspectives, in dialogue or in conflict with each other across time. Overall, the thesis invites the reader to consider first-person cinema as a paradigmatic form of political inscription in Quebec, and to question notions of “authenticity” and homogeneity in the study of Quebec cinema. Identity entails a process of negotiation that is open-ended and can always be reframed and appropriated by the “other” within.