Jacques Drouin

Making Movie History: Jacques Drouin

Denys Desjardins

Denys Desjardins, Jacques Drouin

Animator Jacques Drouin looks back on his career.

Nightangel

Břetislav Pojar, Jacques Drouin

When a man becomes blind, his life is all turned around. He can only use his touch to get around in his house. The objects become enemies. But an angel is looking over him.

Le paysagiste

Jacques Drouin

In this short, an artist creates a painting of the landscape he sees, then finds he can literally climb into the picture to see the fantastic world inside.

Imprints

Jacques Drouin

In this non-narrative animated film inspired by composer François Couperin's harpsichord composition "Barricades mystérieuses," Jacques Drouin explores a whole new way of using the pinscreen to create animated images. He pivots the screen and uses low-angled light to capture images in high relief. The result is like a sculpture whose expertly modelled forms are revealed through film. A film without words.

Une leçon de chasse

Jacques Drouin

This short animated film follows Antoine, a young boy fascinated by his mysterious neighbour, a man rumoured to have once been a big game hunter. Antoine is eager to learn about hunting, but the lesson he learns from the wise older man is not at all what he had expected: Antoine is left with a profound reverence for life.

Ex-Child

Jacques Drouin

Animated film about father and son.

冬の日

Reiko Okuyama, Co Hoedeman

Ryuta Kashiwagi, Noboru Mitani

Winter Days is a 2003 animated film, directed by Kihachirō Kawamoto. It is based on one of the renku (collaborative linked poems) in the 1684 collection of the same name by the 17th-century Japanese poet Bashō. The creation of the film followed the traditional collaborative nature of the source material – the visuals for each of the 36 stanzas were independently created by 35 different animators. As well as many Japanese animators, Kawamoto assembled leading names of animation from across the world. Each animator was asked to contribute at least 30 seconds to illustrate their stanza, and most of the sequences are under a minute (Yuriy Norshteyn's, though, is nearly two minutes long).

Jacques Drouin en relief

Guillaume Fortin

Jacques Drouin

This documentary is a portrait of the animator of Le Paysagiste, from his childhood in Eastern Quebec to his career at the NFB. Trained at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Drouin became in some ways the heir to Alexandre Alexeïeff when he began working with the Alexeïeff-Parker pinhole screen in 1974. Recounting his relationship with the filmmaker and inventor, coming back with lucidity and precision on the whole of his own filmography, Jacques Drouin delivers here a precious testimony on creation. Enriched with numerous excerpts and unpublished images from the filmmaker's personal archives, Jacques Drouin en relief is both the adventure of a lifetime and a valuable lesson in cinema.