Nancy Belzile

LES MOTIFS DE LA FUITE
01.12–02.25.2006
Room 2

The human and the natural test each other’s limits in the dreamy tumult of Nancy Belzile’s new short films.

Projected in a continuous loop, the viewer takes in silhouetted trees, slight ripples of light, the sudden spread of shadows – a curious assortment of the neglected, small miracles of the natural world, the kind of things that are, more often than not, relegated to the margins of our peripheral vision. In these films (originally shot on Super 8 and then digitalized) however, they take centre stage, inverting the normal hierarchy of the perceptual world and forcing the question of what, precisely, goes into making up “the real.” This uncertainty grows as each sequence rushes by, every slight flickering and motion takes on weight and rhythm, growing vaguely abstract through repetition and the soundtrack’s blurred blend of music, silence and obscure noises.

Motionless oneself – and observant – one wrestles with something as absolutely ordinary as recognition.

Belzile’s motion pictures (and the words apply in every possible sense) assert the natural sources of the imagery and their status as representation all at once. Nostalgia swells, inevitably of course, as these beautiful, slightly idealized images roll by, but it is a nostalgia that is paradoxically accompanied by a hyper-awareness of their very constructedness, their mediation, and their profound deracination. And this, in the end, might be their greatest strength, making us conscious of the powerful – and yet pleasurable – tensions in our relationship to nature. It makes us conscious of the acute fact that our drive towards the pastoral is a rush for a purely imaginary arcadia. They bring home the truth that there are two, coequal terms in what we call, for lack of a better designation, human nature.

Text by Peter Dubé