Philippe Léonard

Something Fishy is the encounter between the traditional fishing practice immortalized in the awakening of direct cinema by Pierre Perrault in Pour la suite du monde, and analog photography. By the juxtaposition of images of these two practices endangered, using overlays deficient, excessive and clumsy, picture paused, the concrete gestuals caused by the body of the fisherman and the filmmaker come together in their relationship to the material by the changes they incur in their respective environments (ocean / light and shadow). The visual dialogue between these two figures proposing the rehabilitation of the object and image, image-living display, developed in the darkroom and re-exposed then projected through the intermediate symbolic return to nature.

Over the last 25 years, the Montreal post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor has released seven albums and presented visually extraordinary shows around the world. At State’s End is their latest show, captured at the majestic Cinéma Impérial. It features six 16 mm projectors playing images in a loop to accompany the music from the band’s latest album. Part documentary, part experimental film, At State’s End! is a unique auditory and visual experience.

Roundtrip is a three-minute film that documents two train journeys (from New York City to Montreal, and back again) undertaken by Leonard and his partner in the fall of 2014. Through the consistent use of a split-screen, the two journeys can be observed side-by-side, unfolding in parallel within the film’s vertically divided frame. The purpose of the trip was to visit the father of Leonard’s partner in hospital where he was receiving a kidney transplant from his own sister. While this background information is not made available to viewers of the film, it constitutes the hidden narrative center of the film which is further mirrored in the work’s formal concern with questions of division and unity.

A collective drone composed by Montréal artists during the COVID 19 confinement set to a film by Philippe Léonard.

An audiovisual poem floating through an apocalyptic landscape devoured by boreal wildfires and the ruthless exploitation of fossil fuels. Recorded in 2016 at the Athabasca oil sands in Canada.

Ideas take shape in a kind of cerebral magma where the referents are assigned to parcels of experience from which intelligible elements are formed. Perceptual Subjectivity is an essay on the structural formation of thoughts.

Repeated gesture of panoramic representation becomes abstraction. This film takes place on the Kondiaronk Belvedere where people come to see the Montreal skyline and its surrounding landscape.

Following in the Extra Terrestrial's footsteps, the QT wants to go home. 'My Queer Samsara is a critical look at a constructed social identity that hides underneath it a gnawing want; a need to 'go back home' and be fully accepted into the bosom of our very first loves, the ones who were supposed to take care of us, our families.'

Project commissioned by the Goethe Institut and the MIT Open Documentary Lab under the mentorship of Harun Farocki. Labour in a Single Shot explores the theme of work, paid and unpaid, through the lens of the single take inspired by the Lumière Brothers. A 35mm hand-cranked camera loaded with a 100' of film has been used to replicate the documentary techniques of early cinema. A hand-cranked projector is also used as a screening apparatus.

"State of Mind" is conceived as an exploration of the mind through the basic elements that constitute the activity of the brain: light and electricity. The performance uses photocells to transform light variations into electrical signals and thus, into sound. It can be shown as a single-channel projection, live performance or installation; it all depends on the context where it is shown as well as the state of mind of the moment. Every time it is shown, the editing changes as well as the approach of the sound/image relationship to convey the natural instability of one's brain activity. The piece has also been performed with musicians reacting to the visuals in conjunction with the photocells which are output to their set up, insuring a certain synchronization.

"[T] is a film at the limit of cinema, an experiment in the moving image where stillness and movement converge on each other to produce an experience of time as space. Philippe Leonard shot the footage for this remarkable work at Times Square, in New York City, during the hours of artificial illumination. Partly for this reason, it is an oneiric diary, tempted by myth and, at the same time, suffused by a melancholy sense that myth has lost its magical power. Faces appear and disappear in spasmodic waves of light, which emanate from billboards and mobile telephone screens and confuse the boundary between the organic and the artificial. The dilation of time and the miniaturization that that enables in [T] also ensures that the momentary betrayal of excitement, suspicion, attraction, hesitation, boredom and relief that traverses these faces approaches pure physicality." - Rosalind Morris

These images were captured during a long afternoon spent sitting in front of the Pantheon in Rome, paced by the sound of a shutter regularly opening and closing for long exposures whose duration was counted off in a whisper. At precise intervals, the photosensitive surface recorded the constant flow of tourists, people-watchers, cars and animals as they moved, stopped, gathered, and took photos. The historic building thus reveals itself as a magnet whose pull on people has lasted for centuries. "I Was Here" is a reference to the common phrase often found scratched on public walls, marks left as visible proof of a person’s visit to a place. Like that age-old practice, travel photography is an attempt to record a person’s presence in a particular place – a photographed place taken home as proof.