Imprint

“Louise Bourque’s ‘Imprint’ focuses obsessively on home-movie images of her family’s house, which seems gloomily oppressive, almost filling the frame; she repeats the images with various alterations – tinted, bleached, partly scraped away – as if attacking the place, turning its darkness into light.” – Fred Camper, The Reader, Chicago, April 16 1999 “‘Imprint’… throttles and exhausts a particular memory-image (a family on a porch in an ambiguous position – good-bye/hello, reuniting/reinforcing/celebrating?) and traces its corrosion and dissolution even as it intensifies it physically. Dyes, zip-a-toning, a weird daguerrotype shiny effect, and ripping makes for a very concrete trip.” – Edward Crouse, San Francisco Bay Guardian, 1998 “Family portraits are frozen memories, saturated with melancholy and nostalgia. Bourque portrays her family in a very ambiguous way in her authentic 8 mm home movies. By bleaching, scratching and perforating the films she creates a rawness which greatly contrasts with the actual content of the films themselves – children playing gently and the warmth associated with ‘home’. The abstracted memories slowly blur into a concrete reality in the film, but the strong desire for love and tenderness still lurks apparent behind this facade of distorted images.” – Annemick Engbers, Impakt Festival catalogue, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 1998 Selected Screenings & Awards: Bronze Experimental Film Award and Tour, a 32nd New York Expo of Short Film & Video, 1998; Director’s Citation, The 18th Annual Black Maria Film & Video Festival, Jersey City, NJ, 2000; Opening film, International Biennial Film and Architecture, Graz, Austria, 1997; Melbourne International Film Festival, Australia, 1998; San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco, CA, 1998; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück, Germany, 1998; Impakt Festival, Utrecht, Netherlands, 1998; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, MI, 1998