Genres: Animation

  • Escalate

    “Escalate” is an animated short that features stop-motion and scratch animation with original music by Pixie Cram.

  • Fissures

    A film about forgetting and remembering, about past presences and the traces they 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 images warp and fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting apparitions, like re-surfacing memories. The footage was hand-processed and solarized as well as hand-coloured through toning. “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, March15 –…

  • Jours en fleurs

    “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. – LB “Those few shorts…

  • Self Portrait Post Mortem

    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…

  • Phont Cycle

    This short film is about the consequences of my personal choices and the lessons that I’m doomed to repeat. I have chosen, as subject, to animate the Tibetan letter “AH” in the traditional U-Chan form to demonstrate – in the way of a simple visual metaphor – some of the differences between Karma and my freedom to choose. This film is constructed as a visual “process loop” and may be screened once or repeatedly. Sacred chants by Tibetan Buddhist monks. Colour by Technicolor, Montreal.

  • In a Present Distance…

    “In a Present Distance…” explores the complex terrain of motherhood, through an experimental narrative about a woman who travels to Quebec City to do research for a film she is making. While on the train, fragments of her life emerge and speak subtly to the journey of life: of grieving and loss, of happiness and sadness, as well as the joyful and reverent gestures of living. At the heart of this film is her child, shown at various times and spaces in his development as he explores the world around him. It is through him and his growth and discovery…

  • Truth

    “Truth” is the first of two experiments in animation involving the transposition of conceptual material to visual form. The film explores what is in philosophical circles called the correspondence or representational theory of truth. Technically, the film demonstrates the power of simple stop-motion technique using cut-outs. The voice-over narration is intercut with cut-out maneuvers shot single-frame to rockabilly music. Precise synchronization to sound effects enhances the exploration of grace, expression through movement, and timing. The second of the two films, “Relativism” (1999), introduces the use of color.

  • Relativism

    “Relativism” is the second of two experiments in animation involving the transposition of conceptual material to visual form. The film continues an examination begun in an earlier animated film, “Truth” (1998), which introduced the correspondence theory of truth by relying strictly on motion and sound. Relativism addresses objections to this theory by utilizing the symbolic potential of color. Using an elaborate process of multiple-exposures, wherein the same black frames were reshot to introduce different visually-synchronized color elements into the image, the film manipulates the additive process of color production. Instead of relying on the reflective colors of objects beneath the…

  • Sex Life of the Chair, The

    “The Sex Life of the Chair” treats the chair as a domesticated animal and develops a theory of its reproductive life to represent in animated drawings. Proposing that the human backside functions much like the airborne insect in plant pollination, the film integrates drawn studies of adolescent chair rotation with a sequence representing a chair’s sexual fantasy of witnessing a dancing pair of pink buttocks. The graphic style eschews the standards for children’s animation in favor of a pseudo-scientific accuracy and precision.

  • Testosterone

    An animation to a Peter Kastner song mocking the darker side of MAN.