Film Format: 35mm

  • Drag Rock Movie

    The macho singer only has one take.

  • Wide-Eyed

    In an awkward attempt to meet the ideal western standards of beauty, Julie, a 16-year-old Korean-Canadian, obsesses about double eyelid surgery. Her tomboy sister Jean is fascinated yet repulsed by her older sister’s serious body-image issues. Neither of them can come to any entirely comfortable sort of compromise on the right way to love each other, or themselves. Selected screenings: International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany; Visual Communications, LA, California; Giffoni Film Festival, Salerno, Italy.

  • Making Pictures

    “Making Pictures” is an experimental film that follows a fine art photographer being photographed by a documentary crew as he travels through China “making pictures” of massive industrial projects. The film contrasts the photographer and the laborers ‘at work’ and brings up complex questions about making art in that context. The film was photographed as a home movie on black and white super-8, hand-processed and blown up to 35mm for release. All of the lab work was done by the filmmaker including the optical printing and print processing. The texture of the film is as impressionist as the photographers’ work…

  • Almanac, The

    A 52-week film cycle shot with a vintage 35mm hand-cranked camera and processed entirely by hand. The project is a survey of essential human rituals that have not changed in thousands of years and the contemporary landscapes against which these rituals continue to be carried out. Loosely structured around the milestones reached during the first year of a child’s life, it is an examination of the human condition though the lens of 19th-century technology.

  • gun / play

    After shooting a strange episode that occurred spontaneously on a secluded beach, I realized that there were two other rolls shot years earlier that might work as a triptych. A subconscious reaction to the escalating gun violence in the city and in all corners of the earth. (JP) “Price’s camera peers over the rushes like a hunter. Three incongruent and gloriously hazy sequences discover the malice in the bucolic.” – Chris Kennedy, Images Festival, Toronto 2006 Technical Specifications hand-processed 16mm, optically printed to 35mm for release. black and white, 8:45 minutes, 1:1.37, cd sound, 24fps. Credits John Price : cinematography,…

  • Going Back Home

    Turmoil of unsheltered childhood; the dwelling as self. “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 “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 Festival, 2001 “To the scratchy sounds of an old music box… ‘Going Back Home’ weaves snippets of old reels of houses collapsing, fires…

  • 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 the Kingdom of Shadows

    “In the Kingdom of Shadows” documents a paragraph being typeset on an early twentieth-century Ludlow Linecaster. The text is taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of the Lumiere Brothers’ film “Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat” (1895). As the words melt into a pool of lead, the alchemical magic of printing is linked to that of cinema. Commissioned by LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) for their 25th anniversary program, “Film is Dead! Long Live Film!” Selected screenings: Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2007; Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2007