Louise Bourque: Scene of the Crime

Art & Trash, episode 9
Louise Bourque: Scene of the Crime
Stephen Broomer, April 8, 2021

Louise Bourque began to make films in the late 1980s as a student at Concordia University in Montreal. Since the mid-1990s, Bourque’s films have dealt with plastic manipulation of the film plane, in the form of scratches, chemical alteration, contact printing, and tricks of time affected by way of optical printing. Scene of the Crime surveys Bourque’s work, from her early experimental dramas (Jolicoeur Touriste, The People in the House), to her abstract work (L’eclat du mal / The Bleeding Heart of It, Jours en fleurs, Remains), to her self-portraits (Self-Portrait Post Partum, Auto Portrait / Self-Portrait Post Mortem), with attention to her self-conscious use of the machinery and constitution of cinema, for example, the intrusion of shutters on the image, the layers of colour in emulsion; as well as the autobiographical suggestions of much of Bourque’s work, an exploration of trauma and a search for catharsis.

The narration of this video is derived from Broomer’s writing on Bourque, originally developed for the book, Moments of Perception: Canadian Experimental Film, edited by Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, forthcoming from Goose Lane Editions, Fall 2021, and for Imprints: The Films of Louise Bourque (eds. Stephen Broomer and Clint Enns), Canadian Film Institute, 2021.

Louise Bourque's films are available for rent from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, The New York Film-makers’ Coop, Light Cone, and Canyon Cinema.

SCRIPT:

Louise Bourque began to make films in the late 1980s as a student at Concordia University in Montreal. The bulk of her films were made while living in Boston, Massachusetts, where she also taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. From the mid-1990s onward, Bourque’s films have dealt with plastic manipulation of the film plane, in the form of scratches, chemical alteration, contact printing, and tricks of time affected by way of optical printing. In the 2000s, she returned to Canada, where she now lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Bourque’s first film, Jolicoeur Touriste (1989) combines broadcasts about interstellar travel, home movies, and a monologue about journeys taken in childhood. The monologue is repeated and with each repetition becomes stiffer and more self-consciously performed. A man repeatedly grabs a beer from a nearby fridge, slumps in his chair, turns the radio dials, watches late-night dial-flipping television broadcasts, all of this seen in casts of unnaturally saturated colour (the blue of the television, a green lamp near the fridge and radio, a red lamp hanging over the figure’s recliner). Like the monologue, the sequence is repetitious, as if the man is suspended in the interminable attention of space travel. At the end, after recounting a visit to the planetarium, the figure is seated, his form optically removed and filled with images from the home movies. The theme suggested by this final image, of the self riddled with the dust of the past, is one that would persist throughout Bourque’s work. Her next film, Just Words, uses a monologue by Samuel Beckett (Not I, 1972, historically performed, as it is here, by an illuminated mouth), as a backdrop to home movies of her mother, sandwiching the menacing undercurrent of the home movie to the mouth’s declarations and denials. In this, Bourque continues this theme of the past occupying the present, if we are to take the mouth as the present—as a surrogate for the filmmaker—and the home movie, inevitably, as a past that interrupts and illustrates or provides counterpoint.

The People in the House is the sole continuation of the style of Jolicoeur Touriste, in its use of primary-coloured light to develop a stylized, alien atmosphere. Otherwise the film is a psychodrama in the tradition of Maya Deren: a house is occupied by a number of figures who perform rituals—they dance, they sleep, they gather to tearfully read a letter, potting a gift of flowers—the routines that are performed by these figures, for the most part in slow motion, turn menacing with a sad-eyed patriarch carrying the seemingly lifeless body of a woman in formal dress and long gloves up a turning stairwell. Montage renders all of these events discontinuous, overlapping, and Bourque’s optical effects include a slowed shutter that makes the space of the house all the more alien, staggering time, casting trails through corners and scenery in such a way as to create even more stylized colours and textures. These effects render the figures as spectral. The “people in the house” are ghosts of an unspecified past.

Bourque’s work had, from its start, engaged with elaborate optical effects, but she had also balanced these effects with dramatic content in the forms of monologues and the presence of actors. With Imprint, these traits are shed in favour of a plastic experience. The film draws from footage of the edifice of a family home, seen, primarily, in photographic negative, first in a pale blue colour cast, which changes as Bourque’s method of experimentation changes. Early in the film, Bourque’s plastic manipulation involves cutting out a circle in the middle of the frame, leaving in the punched-out image so that it vibrates in place; later sections of the film use a photographic negative unconstrained by tints, the house surrounded by bleeding black forms. Finally, the windows are etched out, and with the image now in photographic positive, the faces of children running around the lawn become more visible. As the soundtrack shifts from gritty, restless noise to the sounds of Enrico Caruso singing “A Dream,” that distant pastoral anthem of bygone days, the emulsion is rent from the frame, refiguring in quick bursts the shape of the house and making visible the underlying blue and pink of the filmstrip. These colours become more violent, more autumnal, as the section repeats, until the image is finally fully abstract, pulsating forms of cyan and magenta.

The themes and stylistic traits of this work—this newly plastic, abstract direction—would continue in Fissures, in which home movies are cropped, their frame lines shifting, their sprockets providing a continuous rhythm coursing through the frame, the image smearing, bleeding light and solarized, passing in a single composition from positive to negative and fading into darkness. Going Back Home likewise uses images of home, here in traces of catastrophe: in a sequence of eight shots we see a derailed train car, a sunken house, a dog on a roof, a raging inferno in a window, the controlled collapse of buildings, all in a golden hue. The film repeats for a second look. With the comic aplomb of a mellifluous toy piano on its soundtrack, Going Back Home offers a series of homes to which no one can return. Bourque would revisit the footage from Imprint in L’éclat du mal / The Bleeding Heart of It, this time with a soundtrack in which the filmmaker narrates the content of a terrifying dream of wartime that seems to be illustrated by the decay. In her accompanying annotation, Bourque describes the role of such traumas explicitly: “the house that bursts; the scene of the crime; the nucleus.” Between this synopsis and the terrors described by Bourque on the soundtrack, the images of the family become deeply unsettling, even threatening.

Self Portrait Post Mortem is the first of two self-portraits, this one made from an image of Bourque as a young woman. She occupies the centre of the composition, in a sequence slowly advancing frame by frame. Her eyes are shut at first, then she stares into the camera. Each frame is eaten away at its edges by mold, each abstraction advancing manually through the shadow of the preceding one. Bourque would repeat this gesture, the manual advancing of decayed frames, in Jours en fleurs and Remains, films that largely eschew representational imagery in favour of non-objectivism and the experience of colour. In the case of Jours en fleurs, made using images incubated in menstrual blood for nine months, there are rich blues and browns, the patina of time achieved by way of her blood; in the case of Remains, yellow and white pair with a brief glimpse of the maternal figure from The People in the House. The second of Bourque’s self-portraits, Auto Portrait / Self Portrait Post Partum has a three-part structure: following a prologue, of speech taken from a love letter, the first part begins: it is a long-take self-portrait, in a blue cast, trained on Bourque’s tearful face, with closeups on her eyes and lips, accompanied by songs by Neil Young, the Supremes, and others. The second part involves the distortion of found scenes from movies and scratched texts and attributions; the scenes she has selected suggest violence inflicted by a man onto a woman. The final sequence involves a further act of self-portraiture, of Bourque underwater, floating ethereally towards liberation from mourning and from yearning. Throughout the film, text communicates a devastating separation, in this case, from her former longterm partner, confessional filmmaker Joe Gibbons. Auto Portrait / Self Portrait Post Partum is a major work for Bourque that lays bare one of her primary themes: catharsis, and the achievement of catharsis through objects (be they home movies, records, love letters).

In 2011, Bourque made a little prayer (H-E-L-P), distinct from her prior work in the speed and aggression of its editing. It uses the rolling of a shutter, its opening and closing, to glimpse fragments of found footage of magician Harry Houdini trying to free himself from chains. The stroboscopic effect shuttles us from representation to non-objective imagery, mixing the shot of Houdini, scenes from Niagara Falls, lines of men in uniform, with images resembling the black and white slashes of Franz Kline paintings. The quick roll of the shutter leaves us in a state of unstable vision that cannot glimpse the whole of any single composition, such that the edges of each image are glimpsed only at the moment when the shutter rolls back, to close and open again on a new image. This is an opposite strategy to the one employed by Bourque in Self Portrait Post Mortem, Jours en fleurs, and Remains, where the slow advance of a shutter allowed each image to be seen in full and to overlap with what preceded and followed. Bourque’s work has always played with what was not visible, from her earliest use of the home movie and its mysterious surfaces, to her photochemical abstraction of the image; here that tactic achieves its apotheosis, demanding an engagement that tunes the eye, and through it the whole organism, to the flicker of the image.