L'éclat du mal / The Bleeding Heart of It

Preceding any image, Louise’s voice utters for the first time a line that will become a central motif of the film: "In my dreams, there’s a war going on…" The evocation of an inner war colors the premise of L’éclat du mal / The Bleeding Heart of It, a work haunted by memories buried in the unconscious.

Footage shot by her father, here reappropriated, transformed, and degraded, becomes the means through which childhood memory and its wounds are revived. These images, tinged with pink and red, green and blue, create an exercise oscillating between blur and transparency, confusion and lucidity. Taking the form of a delicate act of memory, the editing animates its obsessive, imperfect, and vulnerable character. The intimate is amplified through images of the family frame superimposed with Louise’s voice, striving to invoke something hidden, repressed. From this cycle emerges a domestic and personal specter. While the dream somatizes these ghosts, cinema makes them visible.

Too little discussed in Louise’s filmography, this work is a sensitive experience engaging with the phenomenological and haptic aspects of the medium. L’éclat du mal / The Bleeding Heart of It plunges deeply into what is buried, igniting its content in search of meaning.

Mathilde Fauteux
Distribution Coordinator
Vidéographe