Population Explosion

Short animation from Tali

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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?