Photochemical Alterations and Image Destruction - Text 2
Self-Portrait Post Mortem (Louise Bourque, 2002, 35 mm, colour, sound, 4 min.), by André Habib
The idea of burying a film may seem quite strange, especially if it is done deliberately. While there exists film stock which has been buried in order to be forgotten – think of the cans of nitrate film found in Dawson City and celebrated in Bill Morrison’s film Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) –, there are experimental filmmakers who quite consciously entrust their reels of film to the earth, an act at once poetic and conceptual. This is the case of major filmmakers such as Emmanuel Lefrant, Carl Brown and Guillaume Vallée. No doubt the most striking and moving example, however, is that of Louise Bourque’s Self-Portrait Post Mortem. Bourque is a filmmaker of Acadian descent known in the experimental film community for films which work the materiality of the film stock, their manipulation by optical printer, their re-used images (sometimes drawing on her own work), their hand-development techniques and photochemical decomposition (resulting from a “materiological” turn in which artists such as Carl Brown, François Miron, Phil Solomon and Peggy Ahwesh participated).
In 1996, as she prepared to relocate definitively to the United States, Bourque decided to bury underground 16 mm out-takes from her first three films (Jolicœur Touriste, The People in the House and Just Words), which dealt with the family, family ties and the home. She buried her reels of film, barely wrapped up in newspaper, telling herself that she might do something with them someday; it was an act in which both a desire to preserve her work and a kind of death drive, a will for destruction, were tied up. When she dug up the reels in 2001, the first thing she discovered when she unspooled the first roll of 16 mm film was her own face, her eyes closed, circled by scoria. The blots of decomposition, golden, ochre, green and violet coloured, which had eaten away at the edges of the image, had nevertheless left the centre of the image more or less intact. Knowing that she could not send her film to a laboratory to make a print, because no contact printer could pull the film through its machinery (the perforations were too damaged), she decided to re-film these images in slow motion – as she herself had seen them – using a monitor on a Cinemonta editing table. The unspooling of these images (the very first on this rediscovered reel) were first filmed digitally (HD) from the Cinemonta screen before being transferred to 35 mm film stock. As they would on a Steenbeck editing table, the Cinemonta images unspooled without a shutter through a prism (evoking its distant ancestor, the Praxinoscope). Visually, this technical peculiarity took the form of a succession of images sliding by, merging into each other, rather than being scanned by the shutter which creates instead a somewhat jumpy blinking effect – as seen in Ken Jacobs’ film Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969-71).
Self-Portrait Post Mortem is like a self-portrait from beyond the grave. In the film a series of abstract images, forms and earth tones files past before Bourque’s young face appears, rising up out of the shadows like a mortuary mask, her eyes closed, almost immobile, encircled by whirling organic matter. Following a furtive gesture with her hand, which rises towards her face (the way, one imagines, a resuscitated person would move forward haltingly before opening their eyes), her head turns and her eyes open, fixing themselves on us from a distant point which appears to be at once a past and future time, as if she were staring at us from the past in which we had buried her and, at the same time, was already observing us from death. In the way it makes use of the aesthetic possibilities of the decomposition of the film stock, Self-Portrait Post Mortem is a pas de deux between the corrosive action of nature and the photochemical imprint specific to filmic materiality. In this way, the fragility of the film stock becomes the metaphorical, aesthetic and philosophical agent of the face of our own mortality.
