Imprint

As the American film critic Michael Sicinski has aptly noted, Imprint marks a shift in perspective toward the motif of the house, a central element in Louise Bourque’s work. Once an interior space through which the camera moved, the house here becomes an object—a visual device—approached from the outside. Like a threshold crossed, it releases mnemonic forces that are then manipulated, prodded, and layered to the point of excess.

Indeed, Imprint operates from an indexical memory rich with symbolic resonance. Drawn from the home movies shot by the filmmaker’s father, the extracted sequence carries within it an affective engagement with family imagery, as well as a transformative shift in perspective.

To the percussive sound of an abstract mechanism echoing the visual play of repetition, the façade of the house appears—figures scattered around its doorway—like a haunting one we seek in turn to clarify and to blur, to magnify and to destroy. Each repetition of the sequence unleashes an arsenal of processes, like little demons of consciousness: at times they scratch at the windows, at times they isolate figures with a matte, at times they solarize, tear, perforate, or tint the film—just to name a few gestures—as if to embody the obsession condensed in the motif and to render sensorial all the contradictions attached to it. Then Caruso’s voice, singing A Dream, rises. Gradually the image of the house fades, buried under moving pictorial layers. And I hear, in that moment, the tender and ironic laughter of Louise Bourque.

Maude Trottier
Editor-in-Chief, Hors champ magazine