No Place like Home - Les films de Louise Bourque (part 1)
Ce mois-ci, nous présentons deux séances de cinéma expérimental à l'occasion de la parution du livre Expanded Nature : Ecologies du cinéma expérimental sous la direction de Elio Della Noce et Lucas Murari aux Light Cone Editions. La première réunit des cinéastes qui, alors que notre époque est marquée par l’ampleur des actions humaines sur le reste du vivant (l’Anthropocène), s’engagent dans des pratiques écologiques qui tendent à un décentrement du privilège attribué à l’humain. La seconde est l'occasion de découvrir l'ensemble des films d'Emmanuel Lefrant, le directeur de Light Cone, qui collabore régulièrement la Cinémathèque québécoise.
Présenté en collaboration avec Leadership for the Ecozoic, Critical Media Lab (McGill Anthropology Department), Hors Champ et Visions
“A 10-minute tour de force [...]. In Just Words, Bourque intercuts footage of her mother and her sisters with
a performance by actress Patricia MacGeachy of Samuel Beckett’s Not I; the
result is unnerving (as all Beckett is) yet touching (as some Beckett is not).”
Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail, 1992
A film about forgetting and remembering, about past presences and the traces they leave.
Turmoil of unsheltered childhood; the dwelling as self.
"Louise Bourque's Imprint focuses obsessively on home-movie images of her family's house, which seems gloomily oppressive, almost filling the frame; she repeats the images with various alterations - tinted, bleached, partly scraped away - as if attacking the place, turning its darkness into light."
- Fred Camper, The Reader, Chicago, April 16 1999
Jours en fleurs is a reclamation of flower-power in which images of trees in springtime bloom are subjected to the floriferous ravages of menarcheal substance in a gestation of decay. The title is based on an expression from my coming-of-age in Acadian French Canada where girls would refer to having their menstrual periods as "être dans ses fleurs." As a result of incubation in menstrual blood for several months, the original images inscribed on the emulsion undergo violent alterations. The shedding of the unfertilized womb depredates the fertilized blossoms and substitutes its own dark beauty.
The images of a chained Houdini attempting to free himself : the stuttering stop-and-start of his actions ; the high-contrast of the images ; the stroboscopic effect created by the open-close rythm of the shutter ; the gashes in the emulsion from the hand-processing - all combined with the multi-layered soundtrack, evoke the violence of a tortured soul in search of escape.
"In making a little prayer (H-E-L-P), I devised a novel process of manipulating found footage, consisting of the following components : re-shooting the footage on 35mm high-contrast film stock as I was projecting it in 16mm ; executing all kinds of stop-and-start variations on both the projector and camera as a type of home made optical printer ; hand-processing the 35mm film with various effects in the processing ; re-shooting the 35mm film on miniDV off of the 35mm viewer while creating rhythmic variations in the speed of the opening and closing of the shutter as I was pulling the film through ; and finally, making further rhytmic adjustments while digitally editing the images with sound. Shooting, hand-processing and editing 35mm were all a first for me."
- Louise Bourque
35mm hand-processed camera original
"The mother figure revisited - a recurring theme in my work. A celluloid deterioration that addresses the ephemeral quality of the captured moment (the present) while revealing the insistent power of human presence in even the most deteriorated of states. The image of the mother is like a ghost that we won't let go. A lament for the inevitable loss of legibility. "
- Louise Bourque
"A statue of the Madonna from a shrine in the house where I grew up takes on an uncanny appearance as if in response to an incantation (an oft-recited prayer from my childhood)."
- Louise Bourque
The house that bursts ; the scene of the crime ; the nucleus. A universe collapses on itself: all hell breaks loose.
