Karl Lemieux

Passage

Exquisitely filmed in black-and-white, this experimental narrative follows four friends on a road trip as they discover the complicated arena of unseen desire that arises when ecstasy and sexuality mix.

Mamori

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

Nitrate

When the fireworks inflame the memory of a war survival.

El Camino

Optical print film that was constructed from 16mm images that filmmaker Richard Kerr entrusted to Karl Lemieux.

The Bridge

Karl Lemieux's first project, a video interpretation of Lee Ranaldo’s talking sound-piece “The Bridge” (1985), made while attending high school in the Nevada desert, foreshadows Lemieux’s recent projector performances with live musicians.

Miron: Un homme revenu d'en dehors du monde

Writer and poet Gaston Miron comes back to life through archival documents from a variety of sources. His prose features landscapes of human beings and snow, dances with no future, and endless mines. His impassioned speeches on Quebec culture and identity are superimposed on images of demonstrations and political meetings about the future of Quebec. Between his recollections and fragments of memory, a man stands, passionate, convinced, reciting or dancing, to upset the established order and change things before it is too late.

Halo Getters

During a stay in the Death Valley desert in California, Karl Lemieux encounters a demolished house wall, standing alone in a void and whose windows are only open gaps, washed out by light. Fascinated by the incongruity and poetry of the object, he films it. This segment of film, later, he (...) will re-film it in a variety of positions and situations; off-center, oblique, fixed, in motion, and above all hot under the effect of heat. This work will yield the film Halo Getters. The act of burning the film, like under the magnifying glass, doubles the effect and the memory of the light and the intense heat of the desert, the place of origin of the image. An orange circle dotted with bubbles forms in the image, resembling a "sun" which adds to and destroys the image. This circle burning the film in Halo Getters, forms a blind spot which masks and destroys the image, making visible the fragility of the support.

Unearthed

All images and sounds of Unearthed were captured during a residency in the Arctic in Nikel, Zapolyarny and Prirechnyi in the Murmansk oblast in Russia, one of the most polluted areas in the world. True to his experimental cinema aesthetics, Karl Lemieux pursues his exploration of unusual locations as well as his long-term collaboration with musician and composer, BJ Nilsen. Unearthed is based on a work commissioned for the project Dark Ecology (2014−2017) curated by Sonic Acts and Hilde Methi.