Just Words

Between the city, the suburbs and the theft of an automobile.

"'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 dreamy, surreal quality, 'The People in the House' dwells within the tension between harmony and chaos." - Liz Czach, Toronto Film Festival Catalogue, Canada, 1995

Turmoil of unsheltered childhood: The dwelling as self.

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.

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 grounds of a former cemetery) with the ambivalent intentions of both safe-keeping and unloading them (she was relocating). Upon examining the footage five years later she found that the material contained images of herself captured during the making of her first film. That discovery seemed handed over like a gift and prompted the making of this film, a metaphysical pas-de-deux in which decay undermines the image and in the process engenders a transmutation.

"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 having their menstrual periods as “être dans ses fleurs”. As a result of incubation in menstrual blood for several months, the original images inscribed on the emulsion undergo violent alterations. The shedding of the unfertilized womb depredates the fertilized blossoms and substitutes its own dark beauty.

Workprint for a little prayer (H-E-L-P)

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 like a ghost that we won't let go. A lament for the inevitable loss of legibility.

Rooftop Song is a part of 3 videos made at the Lenox Hotel in Buffalo, N.Y.

"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 light." - Fred Camper, The Reader, Chicago, April 16 1999

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 the images fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting apparitions, like resurfacing memories.

Punk rock, direct animation with a tip of the hat to Len Lye.

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 intertwine. A film about loss and absence.

"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

“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 behind the camera, mmy father the person who captured these fleeting moments." —Louise Bourque

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 sound, all evoke the violence of a tortured soul in search of escape.