Pierre Hébert

Painted directly on glass, Black Soul is an exhilarating immersion into the heart of Black culture—a whirlwind voyage through the defining moments of Black History.

A meditation on the passing of time, on a film that was never completed, upon Bazin’s death, on restoration and the future of ruins and on modern-day life that continues in resonance with the old stones.

A film in cut-out animation depicting the demographic problems of the world. It shows that in many countries freedom from the old scourges of famine and disease has in turn created the new problem of more mouths to feed. The film suggests that wealthier nations might increase all forms of aid to struggling nations to create a better world.

This animated film, a small educational musical comedy, offers the viewer a proper enigma. He is very smart who succeeds in solving it the first time; because against this background of cold reasoning, fantasy and delirium retain all their rights.

A satirical, updated take on the classic Jean de La Fontaine fable.

Short animation from Tali

This animated short follows a group of happy vacationers sunbathing... under cloudy skies. Despite the weather, they look cheerful, eating ice cream and hot dogs, frolicking in the sand. When the sun finally breaks through the clouds, everyone deserts the beach. The film presents a fanciful yet awkward scenario in which the strange behaviour of one person may be the delight of another.

At the end of 2016, some circonstances made that after a gap of 15 years I resumed scratching directly on film. I first made a series of thirty one short loops that were posted as GIF’s on Facebook, in May and June 2016. Then I proceeded to build a film out of those segments with the support of the infinite music of Malcolm Goldstein. The result is a meditation on time, both radically abstract and intensely material.

Scratched directly onto 35mm film stock, this abstract film is a visual interpretation of a piece for solo violin based on a Bosnian popular song from Bosnia-Herzegovina. The composer, Malcolm Goldstein, describes it as a gesture of hope for peace in that land ravaged by war during the 1990s.

This film is about cats--actually, one very clever cat. The title is a play on the French quatuor, meaning quartet, but the chorus is not the usual alley-cat variety. The cat in this film is talented indeed. He is both pianist and piano, trumpet and trumpeter and, if need be, even becomes the music--a pulsing rock and roll--or a whole swarm of alley cats.

Originally, the images of Variations on two photographs by Tina Modotti were engraved directly on 16mm film to be projected as a backdrop for Louis Bédard's choreographic piece entitled Elles, which was inspired by the life and work of the well-known Mexican photographer Tina Modotti. My animations were particularly inspired by two images, first a photography of roses and second a photography of telegraphic wires, suggesting on the one hand an intimate and enclosed universe and, on the other, an infinite opening of space full of potential messages. I have reworked and developed them into an almost abstract meditative drama, caught in a tension between those two photographs.

This is a poetic and animated meditation inspired by two trips the director made to Japan. Images and sounds from daily life as well as recordings of his performances, most notably one with the dancer-choreographer Teita Iwabushi. There is no story as such, but a formal construction with sound and images. What can be seen in Japan when Mount Fuji is invisible, lost in the clouds?

This work, shot on film stock, is constructed like a fugue, based on the tension between the ideal of freedom (the wood thrush) and the inevitability of confinement (trapped flies). A poem punctuates the different parts of the film. The final stanza gives meaning to the whole: man in free fall / dizzying quest for solid ground.

In a world where work rhymes with identity and productivity, we meet a man in his fifties who has not worked for several years. A question is asked: what happened at the time for him to quit his job?

A palimpsest engraved on 35 mm black leader over the film Prison by LRobert apoujade (1962).

A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.

An intense exercise of looking at a rockface shot near the waterfalls of Rivière au tonnerre, on the North Shore of the St-Lawrence river. A meditation about opacity, about the fissures that can open up anything, any situation on the infinity of meaning. It is the ontological moment, the moment of pure seeing, amongst the episodes of the Places and Monuments series that is a project of exploration of the fissures that crack any banal scene of daily life, any anonymous crowd, any forgotten monument, and that let seek through, until it explodes, the invisible constellations of history.

“In Green / Gray Story, for the most part, [one saw] vertical streaks and textures, with patterns that flew by. It was partly washed film on which I etched and I drew elements after washing. I used color inks, but since I did not have the money to make color copies, I had the film printed in black” -PH.

In this animation film without words, filmmaker Pierre Hébert and musicians Robert Lepage and René Lussier worked together, and separately, in their respective media. This cinema/music performance recreates, impressionistically, the dehumanizing environment of the urban subway. Drawings etch the outlines of people hurtling through space in underground tunnels. The sound track, elemental and atonal, gives compelling expression to their alienation.

This film was made out of the capture of a live animation performance presented in Rome in January 2005 by Pierre Hébert and the musician Bob Ostertag. It is based on live action shooting done that same afternoon on the Campo dei Fiori where the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned by the Inquisition in 1600. A commemorative statue was erected in the 19th century, that somberly dominate the market held everyday on the piazza. The film is about the resurgence of the past in this place where normal daily activities go on imperturbably. The capture of the performance was reworked, shortened and complemented with more studio performances.

First, about ten years ago, there was a text by Paule Marier. Then, René Lussier made a song from that text for his 2014 album (Toucher une âme). Jim Corcoran translated the text to English and recorded it for his CBC radio program, but instead he decided to send it to René Lussier suggesting that maybe he could do something new out of it. René created a new music over the recorded text and after listening to the finished sound track, the two decided that it would be good if there were images to it. This is how it finally ended up in my Drop Box and it gave birth to this film. Afterward, a French version of the film was made with the original French text.