Film Format: 16mm

  • 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 –…

  • Just Words

    “Using as it’s 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 lightening speed Beckett’s words about home, family and the confines and alienation associated with being a woman.” – Program notes, Madcat Film Festival, San Francisco, 2001 “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…

  • Critical Mass

    “Hapax Legoma Pt. 3; Critical Mass” – Hapax Legoma are, literally, “things said once.” The Greek scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature. The title brackets a cycle of films, which make up a single work composed of detachable parts, each of which may be seen separately for its own qualities. The work is an oblique autobiography, seen in stereoscopic focus with the phylogeny of film art as I have had to recapitulate it during my own fitful development as a filmmaker. (HF)…

  • 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…

  • Memo to Pic Desk

    An idiosyncratic look at staging in news photography, using materials from the archives of a Toronto daily. Moral codes, delinquency and autonomy are pulled into an altered coherence, as vintage photos are examined next to their type-written paper trail. Financial assistance provided by the Ontario Arts Council. Selected screenings & awards: Best Experimental Short Film, Lusanne Underground Film Festival, 2007; Toronto International Film Festival, 2006; Jury’s Choice Award, Black Maria Film & Video Festival, 2007; San Francisco International Film Festival, 2007; Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2007; Big Muddy Film Festival, 2007

  • fall storm (california 2003)

    Sitting in a quiet room; listening to a storm out the window.

  • 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…

  • Crossing the Line

    They are preparing for the big one – the Coming Out Ball. And just how far will they go? This short is a turn-of-the-century crime story exploring the outer limits of the debutant psyche.

  • 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.