In making this piece, Bourque literally distorted the personal home movie images appearing on the film plane through various manipulations in the process of doing her own low-tech contact printing. The point of contact in printing is continuously shifted so that the film plane appears warped and...
"Using as it's text Samuel Beckett's 'Not I,' this shocking gift incorporates optically printed home movie footage and an eerily slick close-up of actress Patricia MacGeachy as she rants at lightening speed Beckett's words about home, family and the confines and alienation associated with being a...
The story of two friends on the cusp of adolescence, Rachel Samson's warm-hearted animation is an ode to those special summer days that contain major changes.
"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...
"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
An unearthed time capsule consisting of footage of the maker's youthful self – an “exquisite corpse” with nature as collaborator. Bourque buried random out-takes from her first three films (all staged productions dealing with her family) in the backyard of her ancestral home (adjoining the...
“In home movies, the gesture of waving provides the future viewer with the acknowledgment of a constant ‘goodbye.’ Yet when the film is projected, it is as if the people waving are saying ‘hello’ from the past in the now, the moment of the projection. This film is an homage to the man...
The images of Houdini chained and attempting to free himself: the stop-and-start (interruption-repetition) of his actions; the high-contrast of the images; the stroboscopic effect created by the rhythm of the shutter; the gashes in the emulsion from the hand-processing - combined with the layers of...
An enclosed space, a struggle against the constraints of personal isolation explored through a fractured narrative. A man living in a broken-down rented room in a Tourist Inn travels through his inebriation, his memories and his fantasies, transcending the limits of time and space, which suddenly...
SPPP is an autobiographical experimental film exploring the ramifications of the devastating breakup of a romantic relationship. The film examines my own emotional responses in the context of how this experience is culturally represented. Painstakingly handmade, the visual and sound treatments...
The mother figure revisited is a recurring theme in Louise Bourque’s 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...
"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...
"'The People in the House' examines the dynamics of a family in crisis and questions the role of religious devotion in the perpetuation of dysfunction. The exterior of the house is never seen, and the family's anxiety, as is often the case, plays out within the confines of four walls. Filmed with a...
