Imprints is a collection of essays, interviews, ephemera, and personal reflections that chart the life and work of filmmaker Louise Bourque. Since 1989, Bourque has made a significant mark on Canadian experimental cinema. Her works often involve the physical manipulation of emulsion, with the content of the work stemming from a different type of imprint, marks of memory and trauma, and her aesthetics are imprinted on the work of contemporary filmmakers dealing with memorial processes and abstract imagery. Contributors include Stephen Broomer, Nathan Lee, Michael Sicinski, André Habib, Sébastien Ronceray, César Ustarroz, Patricia MacGeachy, José Sarmiento-Hinojosa, Scott Birdwise, Dorottya Szalay, Brian Wilson, Micah J. Malone, Todd Fraser, Mike Hoolboom, Guillaume Vallée, Herménégilde Chiasson, Amanda Dawn Christie, and Clint Enns.

Imprints: The Films of Louise Bourque

Arts & Photography

Broomer, Stephen

History & Criticism

Canadian Film Institute

Codes for North is a study of the early evolution of the Canadian avant-garde film and its roots in an aesthetic of difficulty. Stephen Broomer traces the evolution of this cinema through the work of three artists—Jack Chambers, Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland—from their early development as painters in the 1950s to the creation of their epic films: Reason Over Passion (1969), The Hart of London (1970), and La Region Centrale (1971). Their work formed in response to a strain of Neo-Dada that took root in southern Ontario in the late 1950s. From this they developed their individual practices, in directions marked by the purposeful difficulty of late modernism. For Jack Chambers, that difficulty lay in the interstices between lyricism and outrage, and the rare, transformative experiences of heightened perception. For Joyce Wieland, purposeful difficulty came in a collision of earnestness and wit to compose a deeply ironic, militant sentimentality. And for Michael Snow, difficulty formed in the flexible rules of an invented game, self-prescribed boundaries in which to improvise. They focused their individual energies on creating major works that were not only cumulative achievements of purposeful difficulty, but which were also distinctively about Canada the ephemeral, a nation wrestling with its identity, its cultural sovereignty and its future.

Codes for North: Foundations of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film

Photography & Video

Codes for North

Founded in 1966 at McMaster University by avant-garde filmmaker John Hofsess and future frat-comedy innovator Ivan Reitman, the McMaster Film Board was a milestone in the development of Canada’s commercial and experimental film communities. McMaster’s student film society quickly became the site of art filmmaking and an incubator for some of the country’s most famous commercial talent – as the well as the birthplace of the first Canadian film to lead to obscenity charges, Hofsess’s Columbus of Sex.In Hamilton Babylon, Stephen Broomer traces the history of the MFB from its birth as an organization for producing and exhibiting avant-garde films, through its transformation into a commercial-industrial enterprise, and into its final decline as a show business management style suppressed many of its voices. The first book to highlight the work of Hofsess, an innovative filmmaker whose critical role in the MFB has been almost entirely eclipsed by Reitman’s legend, Hamilton Babylon is a fascinating study of the tension between art and business in the growth of the Canadian film industry.

Hamilton Babylon: A History of the McMaster Film Board

University of Toronto Press

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Books by Broomer, Stephen