Louise Bourque is an Acadian French Canadian filmmaker living in the Boston area where she teaches cinema. Her films have been presented in forty countries in five continents. Screenings at international festivals include Sundance, Rotterdam, Toronto, Tribeca, San Francisco, Kerala, São Paulo, Hong Kong, Melbourne, and London. US broadcasts include PBS and the Sundance Channel. Bourque’s work was presented at the 50th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and is currently being screened as part of the 2006 Whitney Biennial
"Louise Bourque makes beautifully evocative films about memory and
recollection [...]."
-Andy Spletzer, The Stranger, Seattle, February 4-10, 1999.
FILMOGRAPHY
Jours en fleurs 35mm, color, sound, 4.5 minutes, 2003, $60
Self Portrait Post Mortem 35mm, color, sound, 2.5 minutes, 2002, $50
Going Back Home 35mm and 16mm, color, sound, 2 x 30 seconds, 2000, 16mm:$30, 35mm:$50
Fissures 16mm, color, sound, 2.5 minutes, 1999, $30
The People In The House 16mm, color, sound, 22 minutes, 1994, $85
Imprint 16mm, color, sound, 14 minutes, 1997, $60
Just Words 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes, 1991, $45
Jolicoeur Touriste 16 mm, color, 10 minutes, 1989, $45
I began making films in 1987. The possibilities that film offers for
poetic expression as a visual medium are what led me to filmmaking.
My work reveals a particular preoccupation for inner life and
personal history. I am interested in fabricating environments in
which the time and space continuum is fragmented as well as exploring
the fragility of the boundaries between memory, fantasy and dream.
Louise Bourque's website: www.louisebourque.net
Louise Bourque's email: lbourque@mac.com
Writer, Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Sound and Picture Editor, optical effects: Louise Bourque; Art direction: Élène Tremblay and Louise Bourque; Sound concept: Jean-Pierre Morin; Assistant camera: Andrea Iven; Lighting: Glen Martin; Actor: Johnny Chouinard; Narrator: Jean-Pierre Morin.
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 inebriety, his memories and his fantasies, transcending the limits of time and space which suddenly intertwine. A film about loss and absence.
1989, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
Writer, Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Editor, soundtrack: Louise Bourque; Actress (mouth) and Narrator: Patricia MacGeachy; Art Director: Élène Tremblay; Director of Photography (lighting): Anthony Popieraitis; Assistant Editor: Élène Tremblay; Camera Assistants: Fred Ste-Marie and Eric Bernard; Synch Sound Recordist (mouth): Sylvia Wilson; Carpenter: Denis Richard.
"[A] 10-minute tour de force .... In JUST WORDS, Bourque intercuts footage of her mother and her sisters with a performance 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 Globe and Mail, Toronto
1991, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
Writer, Director, Producer: Louise Bourque; Cast: Jacqueline M.
Shadinger (the mother), Julie-Ann Liechty (the older daughter),
Meredith Zinner (the younger daughter); Narration: Zack Stieglitz;
Assistant Director: Hollie Lavenstein; Director of Photography and
Cameraman: Allen Ross; Production Manager: Maria Ramirez; Art
Director: Deborah Stratman; Costumes: Angela DeCarlo; Set Dresser and
Costumer: Julia Gibbs; Hair and make-up: Julie-Ann Liechty; Assistant
Cameramen: Mark Kluiszo, Franklin Cason; Gaffers: John O'Shaughnessy,
Hal Marshall; Grips: Dana Briscoe, Tim Fogerty, Arlene Garfield, Erik
Steven Vignau; Production Assistants: Sara Bonfig, Helen Stallwitz,
Jennifer Twomey, Bridgette Wilson; Sound recording and sound effects:
Louise Bourque, Mark Bain; Optical effects: Louise Bourque; Sound and
picture editing: Louise Bourque, Élène Tremblay.
THE PEOPLE IN THE HOUSE explores the dynamics of a family in crisis and questions the role of religious devotion in that context. The different elements in the film are used in an expressive and poetic way and work together to create an artificial yet convincing claustrophobic universe, a fragile space between memory, fantasy and dream, a place of tension between harmony and chaos.
1994, 16mm, color/so, 22m, $65
Editing, sound, hand manipulation, processing, contact printing: Louise Bourque; Music: "A Dream" sung by Enrico Caruso, recorded in 1903.
"Family portraits are frozen memories, saturated with melancholy and nostalgia. Bourque portrays her family in a very ambiguous way in her authentic 8mm 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 fa?ade of distorted images." - Annemick Engbers, Impakt Festival Catalogue, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1998 "IMPRINT by Louise Bourque throttles and exhausts a particular memory-image (a family on a porch in an ambiguous position-good-bye/hello, reuniting/reinforcing/celebrating?) and traces its corrosion and dissolution even as it intensifies it physically. Dyes, zip-a-toning, a weird daguerreotype shiny effect, and ripping makes for a very concrete trip." - Edward Crouse, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco, 1998
1997, 16mm, color/so, 14m, $40
A film about forgetting and remembering, about past
presences and the traces they leave. In making this piece, Bourque
literally distorted the personal homemovie 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.
"[…] a very short film that meshes the beautifully overlapping style
of Bruce Baillie with rhythm and sound to create a meditation in
blue."
-Stephen Brophy, artsMEDIA, March 15-April 15, 2000
AWARDS
Merit Award, The 25th New England Film and Video Festival, Boston,
2000.
Director's Citation, The 20th Annual Black Maria Film and Video
Festival, 2001.
1999, 16mm, color/so, 2.5m, $20
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."
-Program notes, Images Film Festival Catalogue, Toronto, 2001
"Louise Bourque's Going Back Home conveys a sense of loss and
upheaval with just a few images"
-Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz, Program notes, San Francisco
International Film Festival, 2002
AWARDS, HONORS
Director's Citation, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 2003
Jury Award, 36th New York Exposition of Short Film and Video,
2002
Jury Award, 35th New York Exposition of Short Film and Video,
December, 2001
Innovation Award, The 26th New England Film and Video Festival,
Boston, 2001
Best of NE Film Festival Screening, Coolidge Corner Theater, Boston,
2001
2000, 16mm and 35mm (1:1.33), color/so, 2 x 30 seconds, $20
"Rossetti's Beatrice uses Stan Brakhage as interior decorator in this
through-the-glass-darkly two-way mirror moving picture of death after
death."
-Steve Ausbury, Cinematexas International Short Film Festival
catalogue, 2002
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.
2002, 35mm (academy 1.33:1), color/so, 2.5m, $20
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. — L.
B.
“Those few shorts that attempt something different become standouts
[…], such as Louise Bourque's glittering neo-feminist abstraction
Jours en Fleurs.”
—Ed Halter, The Village Voice, New York, November 19 - 25, 2003
“I can recommend two must-sees in this year's Perspective Canada
[series at the Toronto International Film Festival]. Louise Bourque's
short Jours en fleurs is an abstract series of lapping visuals that
finds limitless colour and texture in a degraded image.
—Cameron Bailey, Now Toronto, Toronto, September 4, 2003
AWARDS, HONORS:
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 18
& April 23 2006.
Flaherty International Film Seminar, 50th anniversary, "Inspired
Filmmaking", Poughkeepsie, NY, June 2004.
Programmers’ Choice Award, Cinematexas, Austin, Texas, September
2003.
Experimental Film Award, Athens International Film and Video
Festival, Ohio, April 2004.
Director’s Choice Award, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, Jersey
City, NJ, December 2005
2003, 35mm, 1.33:1, color, stereo sound Dolby A, 4.5 minutes, $60
2005, 35mm, 1.85 wide screen, stereo sound Dolby SR, 8 minutes, $100