Louise Bourque Day

 

‘Why not begin with an admission? Like too many others, I once believed in progress. I was sent to the usual schools, where grades were counted in a steady addition, one could begin only with the first grade before passing onto the second, which was only a preparation for the third, which inevitably made way for the fourth. Each subject was presented like the old colonial maps, as half finished continents that should be drawn and conquered in a steady campaign of attrition. The entire project reeked of progress, an incremental accretion of understanding, even of virtue.

‘But after school, the dutifully copied diagrams praised by my wise instructors were not able to contend with my playground bullies, the cruel hands that taught me the oldest and unwanted joys of submission. Capital had disciplined us well after all. It was difficult to find pictures for this new state, where every hope of order was crushed by a riot of compulsion. I searched for years, until arriving at last at the brief, hardly there movies of the French-Canadian anti-princess Louise Bourque.

‘It feels strange to write about her picture ruins, as if I were calling out the most retiring person in the room. These are films that refuse notice. They rush past quickly, and are invariably short, as if concerned about overstaying their welcome. They are tangential somehow, they offer not a look but a glance, a glimpse even, a brief interval of openings. Perhaps the fantasy of speaking directly, or illustrating a point, is not where the rub lies, where the urgency calls. Does it seem strange that a projection vehicle like a movie, which is a machine for conserving time and memory, would shrink from the task of presentation? Perhaps these movies offer a different kind of picture, an alternating current even. Locked together, like conjoined twins, is the need to show and to keep a secret.

‘When I had reached the end of myself and became resigned to film school, I was met there with a population that had been failed by language. They couldn’t talk at all. Sounds would come from their mouths but they were unrecognizable, even to the speakers. But there still burned within each one the desire to express themselves, and so we had arrived at this discount suburban hideaway, hoping the new tools of sound and pictures would allow us to say what words could never manage. I can imagine Louise as one of their number. She’s spent a lot of time standing at the front of classrooms as it turns out, trying to make her rent, talking the film talk, even though she doesn’t believe that explanations are helpful, or even necessary.

‘Perhaps in place of an interpretation, one could write about Louise’s films as if words no longer mattered, or at least with the certainty that they will never manage to reveal anything of importance. Words can only point to some distant place where meaning and desire might be located. What a relief!

‘The artist began to work in 1989, and slowly produced a suite of miniatures drawn from her endless Catholic family. She was the youngest of seven children, the pope lived in the maste bedroom encouraging reproduction even as the artist-in-waiting shrank from her expected roles and duties. Where are the bad boys, the ones who don’t fit in? How can I become an escape artist and slip the knot of unwanted attentions? Speaking of knots: I only want what I don’t want. I can only say yes to what refuses me, erases me, negates every hope and action.

‘In her work she begins with a ground, with first principles, and her ground is always the material. It’s the feeling in her hands. She touches every frame, she runs them through her fingers, which are filled with what she hopes is loving indifference. The materials are the golden brick road of escape, she works the silvery tissues, processing her footage herself, introducing salts and baths and forbidden chemistries so that these stolen moments, clipped from someone else’s hopes, can live again, resurrected, torn away from their former settings (some critics like to name this “the parent footage” as if every movie was a family scene). How else to speak about yourself, if you [feel you?] don’t exist, than to work on an endless autobiography made of footage that others have created? These stolen pictures have roots in the artist’s life, they might as well be flickering from picture frames on her desktop, in place of family albums or Instagram avatars. And they are likewise coping machines trying to accommodate the family banishments of religious-state capitalism. It is this passage, from the nameless dread of experience to the film materials, that creates her process and methods.’ — Mike Hoolboom

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Louise Bourque @ Light Cone
Louise Bourque @IMDb
louise_bourque @ instagram
Louise Bourque @ Facebook
Les chuchotements de l’axe Z : entretien avec Louise Bourque
Louise Bourque @ Filmmakers Coop
Louise Bourque @ MUBI
Book: ‘Imprints: The Films of Louise Bourque’
Louise Bouque @ Letterboxd
Letters from Hell: Louise Bourque
Self Portrait and Other Ruins: The cinema of Louise Bourque
A CONVERSATION WITH LOUISE BOURQUE
Past // Images :: Future // Remains: An Interview with Louise Bourque

 

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Extras

Louise Bourque: Scene of the Crime

Visitation Colorista Decayed Test

Visitation Denoise Stabilize

 

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Interview
from Big Red and Shiny

 

MICAH J. MALONE: In looking at your films, I was thinking of the concept of “in-between” and how that particular space-time is rarely represented in film. For instance, your film “Fissures”, where throughout the film you are literally in–between the frames. I was linking that to memory and it is perhaps akin to the “frames” in-between shots from a family photo album.

LOUISE BOURQUE: When you think of a fissure it connotes this idea of the in-between. It suggests the idea of the gap, as what you are missing. But it’s also space that’s opened up, a place to explore, perhaps even something inviting. And this can bring up the idea that what we’re missing can also be something that is rich as well. So you can think of it like a positive and negative space —there is a bit of a pun intended when I say that (it’s literally what is going on in the image, a photographic shift between a positive and a negative through solarization). In the case of that film (Fissures), the gap, the memory, is represented very specifically by the home movie images coming and going and the film material itself has the markings of fissures on it, actual fissures in the film’s emulsion created by my hand manipulations in the printing and developing of the film image. So it’s “missing” emulsion, it’s “missing” information; the absence is literally inscribed on the material. But it’s not necessarily an absence only, it’s the suggestion of a presence in the absence, or it is what takes the place of the “missing” images of the home movies, for instance the violent rhythm of the color and the texture and what they suggest.

MM: Since you mentioned the material aspect of your films, can you talk just a bit on the technical aspect of your films and how they come to look so scratched, scorched, etc.?

LB: I’ve explored a lot of different ways of messing with the film image that could give me not just interesting results but results that I felt had meaning to them in the context of a specific film I was working on. In the case of Fissures for instance, the fact that lost memory or — not just lost memory actually— it has to do with loss in general and in this case, of longing and loss of a parental figure, or loss of ideals of home, —all those types of things that have to do with nostalgia, or what could have been or what was. So it’s not just what the image is, but how it’s treated. In Fissures it becomes very symbolic of this opening up of this other space, like it’s another dimension, you know?

MM: I was thinking of how the manipulation, and the general chemical treatment to the stock film, operates like a veil, concealing the home films and the imagery, not just in Fissures but in all of the films I watched, and how it creates a specific spatial relationship. You mentioned the symbolic aspects, but it’s also very formal. It’s almost like, from the viewer’s position, if one were to walk through that space, they would have to start with the decay and manipulation and move through to a clearer image but… that clearer image isn’t necessarily trust-worthy, or you might say reliable.

LB: I like that. That’s a good interpretation of it. I think you put your finger on it. Well as much as possible because in a way, I guess it is about trying to put your finger on something and it’s very slippery. But I do think you put your finger on the idea that it is slippery. This idea of trying to get to something and it’s something that you’re not always clear about. And it’s all so complex. You might have many feelings attached with a memory. And I think that it’s also not just in the realm of the memory but also in the realm of the present and how we feel about past experiences. It’s really complex. But also in the moment, like in the now of the viewing, I try to bring that to the experience of the viewing so that it’s there, too, this slippery-ness, and perhaps how we negotiate those things interiorly.

It has to do with our mortality as well. It’s these things that are lost, things that are ephemeral, things that we try to hold on to that are just slipping by, and also the things that we let go of that we might be attached to, the things we are attached to that we let go of. And because there’s just this kind of movement as we try to navigate this whole human experience, I guess (chuckles). I laugh a little when I say this because it’s so big, but it’s little too because it’s so common. The things we struggle with and that we have a hard time to even begin to put in words. And in some ways that’s why I make films. I used to write poetry but I felt frustrated with my inability to capture some of those issues I’m trying to explore in my films. I couldn’t do it, at least in any way that was satisfying to me. And when I discovered film, I felt there was this possibility to give some kind of voice to those things that are so hard to put into words, and that have to do with experiencing different things through our senses.

I think for me there are three things that probably come out the most on that sensory level in trying to give shape to these things: the visual, the auditory, and the tactile. I usually try to use sound that has a very low frequency. Sounds you don’t just hear but feel physically. And then the other tactile aspect of course, is more like a representation of the tactile. With the idea of texture and the idea of the things that might evoke the tactile, the delicate, almost disappeared thing when you feel the world through this, or it’s sharp edge for instance, so then those kinds of textures.

MM: You were mentioning sound. I’m interested in the sound or the voiceover, particularly in L’éclat du mal/The Bleeding Heart of It, where, at the beginning of the film, it’s like a narration and the voiceover is speaking directly to the viewer. As the film progresses, she (the female voice) changes, and she begins to become muffled and her voice echoes. She’s almost in the house, perhaps metaphorically at least, and, in that sense it changes the position of the viewer. The viewers are then distanced away from the images, certainly their position in relation to the girl narrating.

LB: I like this idea that it sounds like she’s inside the house. In the description of my film for Going Back Home, I refer to the notion of the dwelling as self, this idea of the house, the home as a metaphor for the self. So when you say that it feels like the voice is “inside the house“ to me it’s a great metaphor for “inside the self“. It’s like there’s a turning inward and perhaps that’s where there is real shelter. At one point, the voice seems to start talking to itself and more and more trying to convince itself: “I’m okay; I’ll be okay… “. Recently I came across this line from Beckett saying, “I can’t go on. I go on”. I love that line. In some ways I think the voice in that film is saying that. “It’s dark in the tunnel and I’m heading towards the light, the daylight. It’s dark in the tunnel and I’m heading towards the light”. It almost becomes a mantra like, “I can get through this”. But then I think that it is perhaps at that the point in the film where there might be a shift for the viewer in terms of possible identification with this disembodied voice. Hopefully it’s inviting an engagement so that the viewers might bring their own subjectivity to the experience.

The voiceover is recounting actual dreams of mine taken from an audio dream journal I kept between 1990 and 1992. The narration starts off sort of calm; I think the first line in the voiceover, “In my dream…”, is basically announcing, “I’m going to tell you something. I’m going to tell you my dream.” But soon after, the deconstruction starts happening, the fragmentation…Things start falling apart, like “all of the houses are falling apart”, as it later said in the film’s narration. Things are falling apart and I think that’s what happens to the narrative. It’s a piecing together of fragmentation, because the narration is literally a piecing together of excerpts from different dreams. The key, what is important to each part, is sort of like the story and it becomes what is essential. What is the essential part of this one dream? What is the strong image of that one? And piecing it together while maintaining some kind of tension or contradiction from the association of sometimes conflicting emotions attached to key moments from these dreams.

MM: In talking about the essence, it’s interesting how the bits and pieces she gives in the dreams are very familiar dreams. For instance, she talks about carrying herself as a little girl or running towards the light…

LB: They’re like archetypes in a way…in any case it’s trying to get to some kind of archetypal references.

And with the dreams, I think that ties in there, as well. Even the image of the house, I have so many home movies, but this is the third time that I used these particular images of the house in which I grew up. I have a lot of personal history with that house. Five generations of my family lived there at different times so it’s very loaded personally in terms of family history. But it’s more than that. That particular image of that house as opposed to other footage I might have of it, presents it more like an archetype of the family home with the church steeple in the background and especially with the people in front. It’s in Imprint, it’s in Fissures, and it’s in L’éclat du mal/The Bleeding Heart of it… It’s a haunting image!

MM: So “The Bleeding Heart of It” would be the house. And in that sense, it’s interesting how formal the house is. It really holds the structure of the film.

LB: Yes, exactly. That’s a big part of “The Bleeding Heart of It”. It’s the It. It is the House and all it stands for, the House and the Family; it is the family dynamic within the house. It is the concept of the Home in our culture and what it is supposed to be, what it is and what it isn’t. So you’re right, that is the it. Actually you’re one of the few persons to bring up the It. It has this loaded history going back generations — the Patriarchal Family, all the generations of the It at home, and it’s the bleeding heart of It, because there’s a lot of bloodshed (in metaphorical ways, and also in literal ways) — the house is like a wound.

MM: Wound? Or Womb?

LB: A womb and a wound. It’s a complicated thing.

MM: There was a part towards the end of the film where the house actually starts to bow, and I was impressed that it still stood. It was/is such a buoyant, rubber structure, and metaphorically the house seems to bend but never break.

LB: Yes… but in Imprint there is a total obliteration of it. This film is about, in so many ways, my intervention, what I am doing to this film image of the house, what has imprinted me and how I’m in turn putting my mark on it through hand manipulations and chemical decay processes. In the last segment, where the decay has almost totally obliterated any trace of the house and all is left is abstracted colored emulsion there is still one frame left with a window from the house on it. If you look for it, you can see it, the one frame in a flash. The house is almost obliterated, but still there. And I chose to end with that segment because that is so strong. It’s heart wrenching in a way… makes you feel kind of sorry for the house: “Oh please don’t forget about me! Don’t abandon me!” …I never put it in that way before, but it’s a little bit like that. This idea that you can’t completely get away from it, you know?

 

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9 of Louise Bourque’s 14 films

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Just Words (1991)
‘Using as its text Samuel Beckett’s NOT I, this shocking gift incorporates optically printed home movie footage and an eerily slick close-up of actress Patricia MacGeachy as she rants at lightning speed Beckett’s words about home, family and the confines and alienation associated with being a woman.’ –- Madcat Film Festival

‘… a 10 minute tour de force… In JUST WORDS, Bourque intercuts footage of her mother and her sisters with a peformance by actress Patricia MacGeachy of Samuel Beckett’s NOT I; the result is unnerving (as all Beckett is) yet touching (as some Beckett is not).’ -– Jay Scott

the entire film

 

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Imprint (1997)
‘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

‘Family portraits are frozen memories, saturated with melancholy and nostalgia. Bourque portrays her family in a very ambiguous way in her authentic 8 mm home movies. By bleaching, scratching and perforating the films she creates a rawness which greatly contrasts with the actual content of the films themselves – children playing gently and the warmth associated with ‘home’. The abstracted memories slowly blur into a concrete reality in the film, but the strong desire for love and tenderness still lurks apparent behind this facade of distorted images.’ — Annemick Engbers

Watch the film here for $1

 

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Fissures (1999)
‘A film about forgetting and remembering, about past presences and the traces thet leave. 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. The footage was hand-processed and solorized as well as colored by hand through toning before a final print was made at the lab.’ — Light Cone

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Going Back Home (2001)
‘Turmoil of unsheltered childhood: the dwelling as self. The disasters of life can make it hard to go home. Bourque’s brief beautiful, and affecting film goes by so quickly it’s printed twice on the reel, so you can get a second look.’ — Images Film Festival

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Self Portrait, Post-Mortem (2002)
‘An unearthed time capsule, containing long-buried footage of the maker’s youthful self, reveals an exquisite corpse with nature as collaborator. A metaphysical pas-de-deux in which decay undermines the integrity of the image but in the process initiates a transmutation.’ — IFFR

the entire film

 

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L’éclat du mal / The Bleeding Heart of It (2005)
‘The house that bursts; the scene of the crime; the nucleus. A universe collapses on itself: all hell breaks loose.’ — vucavu

‘In my dream there’s a war going on. It’s Christmas time. I’m running and I’m carrying myself as a child. It’s dark in the tunnel and I’m heading towards the light, the daylight.’ — Louise Bourque

Watch the film here for $1

 

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a little prayer (H-E-L-P) (2011)
‘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.’ — Vanessa O’Neill

Watch the film here for $1

 

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Auto Portrait / Self Portrait Post Partum (2013)
‘SPPP is an autobiographical experimental film exploring the ramifications of the devastating breakup of a romantic relationship. The film examines my own emotional responses in the context of how this experience is culturally represented. Painstakingly handmade, the visual and sound treatments evoke different phases of the relationship (from passionate attachment to escalating conflict to inexplicable breakup) and the various phases of the grieving process – from denial, to yearning, to anger, to final liberation: a healing release effected through the making of this film. A triptych of self-portraits-entire camera rolls, each subjected to different methods of extreme interventions on the celluloid itself-are presented in a series of tableaux punctuated by quotes reflecting on romantic love scratched into the filmstrip. These, along with the sound, are employed as a form of meta-commentary simultaneously foregrounding and deconstructing conventional representations of love, which not only represent but also influence our contemporary experience of the same.’ — Louise Bourque

Excerpt

 

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Bye Bye Now (2022)
‘Waving hello to the filming cameraperson, the subjects, through this very gesture, are also, in some way, providing a future viewer with the acknowledgment of a constant good-bye to a fleeting moment. Yet, when the film is projected and the captured gesture is seen, it’s as if they are saying hello again from the past in the “now” of the projection. This film is an homage to the man behind the camera in these personal family archives, the artist’s father, who left her this heritage beyond mortality in the traces of past lives.’ — Light Cone

Trailer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks a bunch. Then I’ll set to prioritising the underwear I covet to determine which would be the ‘Vermeer’ of them all and hit love up. Wow. My love was, yes, inspired by a film-related matter, as is so often the case, yawn. Yes, take care of your future corpse. If I had known about Aeternal decades ago, I would have applied products. Love de-inventing tiny ear buds so people walking down the street talking on their phones have to wear big, clunky headphones and I don’t mistake them for insane people at first glance, G. ** Bernard Welt, Oh, no, there remain plenty of Bob poems available to do injustice to with my soft-ish voice. I’ll be fine. Envy on the editing. ** jay, Hi. Yeah, I assume the hologram went the way of the television set and land line phone for the same reason. Me too, about the childhood wonder at those wobbly, cheap rainbow looking little ghosts. Big day to you! ** _Black_Acrylic, I still really, really want to see those ABBA incarnations, if they’re still operating there, although I’m guessing they’ll do a tour. Btw: today is PTv2 day. Yum. ** Lucas, Hi. Lucas. Oh, gosh, no problem. If you don’t make it over here then, we’ll meet up some other time. Although I hope she relents for your sake, Paris experience-wise. That’s very cool news that the class workshop was a real workshop. That’s exciting. How did the editing and the presenting go? Yesterday was pleasant again, yes, thank you. Zac and I met up the guy who was the star of our previous film ‘Permanent Green Light’ after not seeing him for a few years, and he’s great, and it was so nice to catch up. That was the highlight. I do like Brancusi, yes, and I did see the show. When he’s good he’s amazing. My favorite sculptors? There’s a lot. Okay, to start, Charles Ray is a sculptor and probably my favorite artist, period. His work and the way he thinks/talks about his work — we’re friends — really influenced me. So check him out. I’ll try to mentally compile a short list of others in the meantime. I hope your today is so great it kind of vibrates. ** Huckleberry Shelf, Hey, Huckleberry. My pleasure, and Amy’s too. I’m glad you’re writing/ chipping, and also that current life is of a quality to compete with your writing. Luck re: the story. The new film is my main writing outlet right now. I don’t know about you, but when I’m working on something, I try to organise my brain so all my ideas fit in that context, the script in this case. For sure there’ll be ideas that end up seeming more suited to fiction, but not yet. Thanks for asking. Enjoy the life/writing combo maximally. ** Misanthrope, Good, on the weekend and boyfriend fronts. I think I get antsy when I don’t have enough going on that I don’t have to organize my time. Big up, bud. ** Harper, Hi, Harper. Great news about the productive writing. Such a blissful state. Very interesting: the Beckett/Joyce anecdote. I like the idea of trying to know everything and then working with what I can’t know/grasp. I’m way into working with the inadequacy of language. Which I guess is more Becket than Joyce. Blanchot, for sure. Blanchot is kind of about self-erasure or trying to reduce the self and the implications of ‘self’ as thoroughly as he can. In his fiction. And writing about that in his non-fiction. He’s my favorite. He’s my writer dude. ‘Death Sentence’ is my all-time favorite novel. It sounds like we think alike re: the ‘multiple things’. Cool. Very nice parallel with the VU. I had that happen too with the Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Psychocandy’ when I was starting to write my Cycle books. It sounded like the whole world to me at the time. Great talking with you, obvs. ** Justin D, Hi! Me too re: Lemercier. Very nice triggered daydream there. Oh, no, we’re still just trying to put the final finishing touches on ‘Room Temperature’, and we haven’t really thought too far beyond that yet. But, yes, that would be interesting. I think that’s up to whatever distributor ends up handling the film maybe? I really need to try to get over my no ‘TV’ thing and watch some of these shows like ‘Ripley’. I’m just afraid it’ll end up eating me, and my time is already taxed. Dilemma. Happy next 24 to you. ** Sarah, Hi, Sarah! I really, really liked your story a lot. Like, a lot! It’s fascinating, and your thoughts and digressions about authorship and books and so on are so rich. The story feels really deep and like it’s mutating all the time while never losing track of its intent. I admired it a lot and kind of studied it while I reading it to try to figure out how you did that, which is my favorite way to read. So, thank you! Are you working something new? Yes, ghost-making, totally interesting. And weird. I can’t remember if I’ve eaten a Dagwood. There used to be this deli in NYC that made these extremely tall sandwiches that would break your jaw if you tried to eat them like actual sandwiches. I liked having them on a plate in front of me. I’m really more vegetarian than vegan. I go back and forth between being total vegan and allowing in cheese and eggs. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 15, so it’s basically lifelong sort of. It took me a while to get the balance right so I didn’t feel kind of hazy, but then I think my body just figured out how to work with what I allowed into it. Happy day! ** dwt, Hi! Welcome!! Wow, it’s possible to make a living making holographic work in the current age? That’s cool. That’s beautiful. I love that stuff. I was working for a while on a theater piece with my collaborator Gisele Vienne that was to have a big hologram component, but the mechanisms were so big and clunky and impossible to disguise — basically glass pyramids — that we had to give up. Nice, wow, about the tactile thing. I don’t know when I would ever get the chance, but now I really want to ‘feel’ it. Thanks a lot. How are you? What else is going on? **  Oscar 🌀, Ha ha, thank you. Uh, … (interobang) Hey, Oscar! (/interobang) Morse code takes a lot of practice. The poor actor had to spend about a week just learning how to type those three words. I haven’t read the Krampus piece yet, but I’m gonna. I’m still kind of obsessed with Hatsune Miku. Zac and I went to ‘her’ concert here a couple of years ago, and it was mindbogglingly great. I guess ‘she’ played at Coachella recently, but whoever toured her cheated and didn’t bring the hologram, so they just projected her on a flat screen, and apparently the crowd almost rioted. Understandably. Cats have the best taste. I hope you can somehow teleport over here and accompany me on a tour I’m taking today of the Paris sewer system, nose plugs included free of charge. ** Okay. I’m thinking that the vast majority of you don’t know the very interesting films of Louise Bourque because they are the polar opposite of widely disturbed, so I thought I would give you the chance to get to know her work if it seems like something that will feed you something of value. See you tomorrow.