Artist Portraits: meet Paule Baillargeon and Pierre Houle

The Fine Art of Doing Artist Portraits
Screening and discussion with filmmakers Paule Baillargeon and Pierre Houle
8 pm, NFB Cinema
1564, rue Saint-Denis, Montréal, tel. (514) 496-6887

Montreal, January 10, 2005—Docu-Mondays opens the new year with a look at how documentarians create portraits of artists. Guests at the January 17th screening and discussion will be filmmakers Pierre Houle and Paule Baillargeon, who will talk about the difficulties of trying to do justice to the work and personality of another artist while looking through their own artistic lens.

The art documentary is a genre in its own right, well established in Quebec, which has produced a wealth of films showing creative people at work. Yet works of art that fascinate and fill us with wonder have a mysterious quality that may not translate easily to the screen. Artists themselves can be as complex and enigmatic as their work, and no less difficult to get inside. What is the best way to “reveal” the artist and the art?

The problems the filmmaker confronts in drawing the portrait of an artist are very specific. What should be the focus—the work? the artist? or the human being behind it all? What is the best way to represent works of art that may have been created for other media or other contexts? How should archival images be used? Is it easier to trace an artist’s development while they are still alive, or after they have died? What about the shadow, the private world, the contradictions and betrayals? Is it possible to do a portrait without creating an icon?

Paule Baillargeon and Pierre Houle will address these and other issues over the course of the evening, drawing on their experience studying leading Quebec artists and using examples from their films. In Claude Jutra, portrait sur film (Claude Jutra: An Unfinished Story), Baillargeon went in search of the man behind the daring À tout prendre. Her Le Petit Jean-Pierre, le grand Perreault (Jean-Pierre Perreault: Giant Steps) uses the same intimate tone to celebrate choreographer Jean-Pierre Perreault, creator of the innovative Joe.

Pierre Houle followed a very different route, working in feature film and as a television director on such series as Omertà and Bunker before turning to the work of two brilliant Quebec painters and shifting to freer, more expansive cinematic forms in portraits of Jean-Paul Riopelle (Riopelle, sans titre, 1999, collage) and Alfred Pellan (Pellan… la femme désirée).

Docu-Mondays is a screening and discussion series designed to encourage reflection on the creative process in documentary cinema. It is organized by the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) in partnership with the National Film Board of Canada.

The screening-discussion on The Fine Art of Doing Artist Portraits begins at 8 pm on Monday, January 17 at the NFB Cinema. The moderator will be Magnus Isacsson, a filmmaker actively engaged in his art and the issues of his time (The Choir Boys, View from the Summit, Maxime, McDuff & McDo).