Pierre Hébert

A meditation on the passing of time, on a film that was never completed, upon Bazin’s death, on restoration and the future of ruins and on modern-day life that continues in resonance with the old stones.

A film in cut-out animation depicting the demographic problems of the world. It shows that in many countries freedom from the old scourges of famine and disease has in turn created the new problem of more mouths to feed. The film suggests that wealthier nations might increase all forms of aid to struggling nations to create a better world.

Trying to describe oneself is a movie about representation. How it is possible, through film, to describe oneself and describe others. With the camera as mirror and third eye. At first, a collage-like combination of letter-writing, investigation and journey, something between documentary and feature film. Finally, a portrait of Boris Lehman from 1989 to 1995, part II of BABEL.

This animated film, a small educational musical comedy, offers the viewer a proper enigma. He is very smart who succeeds in solving it the first time; because against this background of cold reasoning, fantasy and delirium retain all their rights.

A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.

An intense exercise of looking at a rockface shot near the waterfalls of Rivière au tonnerre, on the North Shore of the St-Lawrence river. A meditation about opacity, about the fissures that can open up anything, any situation on the infinity of meaning. It is the ontological moment, the moment of pure seeing, amongst the episodes of the Places and Monuments series that is a project of exploration of the fissures that crack any banal scene of daily life, any anonymous crowd, any forgotten monument, and that let seek through, until it explodes, the invisible constellations of history.

This film is about cats--actually, one very clever cat. The title is a play on the French quatuor, meaning quartet, but the chorus is not the usual alley-cat variety. The cat in this film is talented indeed. He is both pianist and piano, trumpet and trumpeter and, if need be, even becomes the music--a pulsing rock and roll--or a whole swarm of alley cats.

Scratched directly onto 35mm film stock, this abstract film is a visual interpretation of a piece for solo violin based on a Bosnian popular song from Bosnia-Herzegovina. The composer, Malcolm Goldstein, describes it as a gesture of hope for peace in that land ravaged by war during the 1990s.

This film was made out of the capture of a live animation performance presented in Rome in January 2005 by Pierre Hébert and the musician Bob Ostertag. It is based on live action shooting done that same afternoon on the Campo dei Fiori where the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned by the Inquisition in 1600. A commemorative statue was erected in the 19th century, that somberly dominate the market held everyday on the piazza. The film is about the resurgence of the past in this place where normal daily activities go on imperturbably. The capture of the performance was reworked, shortened and complemented with more studio performances.

First, about ten years ago, there was a text by Paule Marier. Then, René Lussier made a song from that text for his 2014 album (Toucher une âme). Jim Corcoran translated the text to English and recorded it for his CBC radio program, but instead he decided to send it to René Lussier suggesting that maybe he could do something new out of it. René created a new music over the recorded text and after listening to the finished sound track, the two decided that it would be good if there were images to it. This is how it finally ended up in my Drop Box and it gave birth to this film. Afterward, a French version of the film was made with the original French text.

Cycling Utrecht is number seven in the «Places and Monuments» series. As with all the other opus of this series, the live action images have been submitted to a process of digital processing in order to give them a greater temporal and spatial density and animation inserts were added to create points of intensity that tell you were to look. In this case, the inseted images of Tour de France are disputing the monumental pole with images of statue that are along the route of the race, and are put in tension with the normal day to day use of the bike that is a very important characteristic of this city.

"A film in which both sound and image were created with a minimum of photographic or electronic equipment. The images are a few simple geometric forms – squares, circles, lines, ellipses – arranged and counter-arranged to generate an increasing number of perceived images. Their appearance on the screen is as percussive as the sound that accompanies them." — National Film Board of Canada

A hand-made, scratched-on film experiment in intermittent animation. The images are a group of twenty-four visuals, all non-representational, which arrange and rearrange on the screen in many combinations. The result is a changing pattern of sound and image that has its own rhythm for eye and ear.

At the end of 2016, some circonstances made that after a gap of 15 years I resumed scratching directly on film. I first made a series of thirty one short loops that were posted as GIF’s on Facebook, in May and June 2016. Then I proceeded to build a film out of those segments with the support of the infinite music of Malcolm Goldstein. The result is a meditation on time, both radically abstract and intensely material.

A satirical, updated take on the classic Jean de La Fontaine fable.

An early experiment in employing computers to animate film. The result is a dazzling vibration of geometric forms in vivid color, an effect achieved by varying the speed at which alternate colors change, so producing optical illusions. In between these screen pyrotechnics appears a simple line form gyrating in smooth rhythm. Sound effects are created by registering sound shapes directly on the soundtrack of the film.

Gives us a glimpse of a life which remains very monotonous despite the social upheavals that mark the country.

This is a poetic and animated meditation inspired by two trips the director made to Japan. Images and sounds from daily life as well as recordings of his performances, most notably one with the dancer-choreographer Teita Iwabushi. There is no story as such, but a formal construction with sound and images. What can be seen in Japan when Mount Fuji is invisible, lost in the clouds?

In Adieu bipède (1987), Hébert turned to performance, using the scratching technique for the scenes with dancing and music. He used the same technique in La Lettre d'amour (1988).

This animated short follows a group of happy vacationers sunbathing... under cloudy skies. Despite the weather, they look cheerful, eating ice cream and hot dogs, frolicking in the sand. When the sun finally breaks through the clouds, everyone deserts the beach. The film presents a fanciful yet awkward scenario in which the strange behaviour of one person may be the delight of another.