Animated Intimacies: The Cinema of Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre
By Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau
Passages (2009)
Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre
The project of exploring the cinema of the animation pioneer Norman McLaren through his own medium recalls, naturally enough, that of Kara Blake in her fine documentary The Delian Mode (2009), whose examination of the work of the musician Delia Derbyshire was inspired by the aesthetic of her compositions. It is thus not particularly surprising that Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre, the director of Les Négatifs de McLaren (McLaren’s Negatives, 2006), co-produced The Delian Mode or that Kara Blake edited McLaren’s Negatives. The connection between the two films is obvious: in each case, the director went beyond biographical anecdote and brought out a personal vision of art rather than a life story.
By using formal means to blur the boundary between McLaren’s work and the portrait of him that she creates, Saint-Pierre takes the view that an artist and his or her work are one. A vision of art is a vision of the world and in the end the world corresponds to the way we view it. This is a truth that fits animated film particularly well; here artists “reconstruct” the world as they please. In The Sapporo Project (2010), a very brief tribute to the Japanese calligrapher Gazanbou Higuchi, we feel once again that what fascinates the filmmaker is this idea of the fusion between the artist and the world. “I want to propagate dance and the rhythm of life in my work”, proclaims the artist whose gestures and breathing Saint-Pierre attentively captures.
In a certain sense, this reflection on the artist begun with McLaren’s Negatives prefigures Passages (2008), in which the filmmaker herself recounts with poignant candour the difficult birth of her daughter Fiona. Here the drawings, even more than the events themselves, help convey her view of them. The appearance of characters drawn in a style light years from graphic realism and interspersed with personal photographs creates a visual conflict that highlights one of the film’s most important themes: the contrast between the individual and impersonal “systems” and the tendency of the latter to dehumanise private life.
In animation Saint-Pierre has found both the means to distance the events she is describing (could she really have made a classical documentary on the subject?) and to assume entirely their individual nature. In this way, Passages achieves a kind of modesty, aestheticizing intimacy without perverting it or, on the other hand, exorcising it. Reality is always present, barely altered, tangible to the point of occasionally rendering the film almost unbearable to watch. With finesse, however, Saint-Pierre achieves the sort of equilibrium which enables the viewer to penetrate this world without feeling as if they are intruding on it.
With this film, her most accomplished to date, Saint-Pierre explores in new ways animated cinema’s potential for intimacy, a project already begun in the film on the Canadian filmmaker McLaren. In that film, its subject asserts that his techniques have made cinema an artisanal labour that anyone can practise at home. Saint-Pierre, for her part, has taken a step further in this direction by incorporating animation into her personal life, approaching a painful private experience through animated autobiography and “overcoming” in a sense the traumatic event by means of the creative process. “I draw my work in a single breath”, Gazanbou Higuchi remarks in The Sapporo Project, “because controlling your breathing is very important for drawing”. In Saint-Pierre’s films, there is a similar desire to become one with creation—as if animation, in the end, had the potential to become a technique of the self.
Consult Marie-Josée Saint Pierre's author sheet +
http://www.panorama-cinema.com
Animated Intimacies: The Cinema of Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre
By Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau
Passages (2009)
Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre
The project of exploring the cinema of the animation pioneer Norman McLaren through his own medium recalls, naturally enough, that of Kara Blake in her fine documentary The Delian Mode (2009), whose examination of the work of the musician Delia Derbyshire was inspired by the aesthetic of her compositions. It is thus not particularly surprising that Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre, the director of Les Négatifs de McLaren (McLaren’s Negatives, 2006), co-produced The Delian Mode or that Kara Blake edited McLaren’s Negatives. The connection between the two films is obvious: in each case, the director went beyond biographical anecdote and brought out a personal vision of art rather than a life story.
By using formal means to blur the boundary between McLaren’s work and the portrait of him that she creates, Saint-Pierre takes the view that an artist and his or her work are one. A vision of art is a vision of the world and in the end the world corresponds to the way we view it. This is a truth that fits animated film particularly well; here artists “reconstruct” the world as they please. In The Sapporo Project (2010), a very brief tribute to the Japanese calligrapher Gazanbou Higuchi, we feel once again that what fascinates the filmmaker is this idea of the fusion between the artist and the world. “I want to propagate dance and the rhythm of life in my work”, proclaims the artist whose gestures and breathing Saint-Pierre attentively captures.
In a certain sense, this reflection on the artist begun with McLaren’s Negatives prefigures Passages (2008), in which the filmmaker herself recounts with poignant candour the difficult birth of her daughter Fiona. Here the drawings, even more than the events themselves, help convey her view of them. The appearance of characters drawn in a style light years from graphic realism and interspersed with personal photographs creates a visual conflict that highlights one of the film’s most important themes: the contrast between the individual and impersonal “systems” and the tendency of the latter to dehumanise private life.
In animation Saint-Pierre has found both the means to distance the events she is describing (could she really have made a classical documentary on the subject?) and to assume entirely their individual nature. In this way, Passages achieves a kind of modesty, aestheticizing intimacy without perverting it or, on the other hand, exorcising it. Reality is always present, barely altered, tangible to the point of occasionally rendering the film almost unbearable to watch. With finesse, however, Saint-Pierre achieves the sort of equilibrium which enables the viewer to penetrate this world without feeling as if they are intruding on it.
With this film, her most accomplished to date, Saint-Pierre explores in new ways animated cinema’s potential for intimacy, a project already begun in the film on the Canadian filmmaker McLaren. In that film, its subject asserts that his techniques have made cinema an artisanal labour that anyone can practise at home. Saint-Pierre, for her part, has taken a step further in this direction by incorporating animation into her personal life, approaching a painful private experience through animated autobiography and “overcoming” in a sense the traumatic event by means of the creative process. “I draw my work in a single breath”, Gazanbou Higuchi remarks in The Sapporo Project, “because controlling your breathing is very important for drawing”. In Saint-Pierre’s films, there is a similar desire to become one with creation—as if animation, in the end, had the potential to become a technique of the self.
Consult Marie-Josée Saint Pierre's author sheet +
http://www.panorama-cinema.com