Hats off!

>> The New Film & Media Fest salutes NFB director Michele Cournoyer

by MATTHEW HAYS

One might have thought the attitude would have been put to rest for good after Norman McLaren made Neighbours, in '52, his Oscar-winning Cold-War parable. But for some, the idea that animation is not a medium suited to "serious" subject matter remains.

Not, thankfully, for NFB filmmaker Michele Cournoyer. Her latest, the short animated film Le Chapeau, won Best Short Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. And now, in honour of this film and Cournoyer's entire body of work (including such shorts as La Basse Cour, Alfredo and Spaghettata), a retrospective will be held at this year's New Film & Media Fest.

Le Chapeau deals with the rather emotionally rough terrain of incest survival. And it's told in a particularly unconventional way, opening with a woman in a bar, performing in a striptease, flashing back to painful childhood memories of a father figure's abusive advances. The story evolves in a style that is ridden with stylistic tension, caught between being intensely complicated and strikingly simple. Told in fluid, black and brown paint strokes on white background, the film morphs along, lending it the sense that it's unravelling in one beautiful take.

Cournoyer reports that her formal choices did not come easily. "I was working with many layers of metaphors," she says. "I was working entirely with computers. My subject was very ugly. Then my producer suggested we strip everything down. So we decided to do it all over again. It was entirely done in computer animation and that seemed too artificial, too cold for this story."

Though the story is not Cournoyer's, like an actor, she found herself assuming the emotional state of her subject, a dancer who'd survived the ordeal of incest. "Using a brush, pen and paper felt more like an extension of me. I let my subconscious go. It became a story about incest and abuse. At first, the setting of the bar seems realistic. But after that, I didn't want to do this story in a realistic manner at all."

Cournoyer says she liked the idea of animating dancing, particularly ballet. "I put myself into the skin of the character. I had to work in a very solitary way, to live with the subject alone. The story came while I was working on it."

Difficult subject matter wrapped in an unconventional style, Le Chapeau might not have proven the easiest sell to more commercial film backers. Cournoyer says much of the credit for the completed project must go to the NFB. "My experience there was wonderful. Really, this is the only place I could have made this film." :

The award-winning Le Chapeau screens as part of the Michele Cournoyer retrospective at the New Film & Media Festival