The first time Michèle Lemieux met Queen Marie-Anne of Austria was in a book. She was overwhelmed by the sadness in the look of this young woman who was her age, when she was painted in 1652 by Diego Velázquez.
Decades later, Michèle Lemieux reinterpreted this portrait using the screen with 240,000 pinheads on which she makes animated films. This gave Table, the short film that she presents to the 22are Animation cinema summits, which begin on May 6 at the Cinémathèque québécoise. A film full of shadows and lights, which we watch as we enter a museum, taking us behind the scenes and the dramas of the 17th century Spanish court.e century.
It is in an NFB studio that we can see the famous pinscreen, one of the very rare in the world, on which she works. It was designed by Alexandre Alexeïeff, a Russian who fled the Bolshevik revolution to take refuge in France in 1917. It was he who invented the device with his partner, the engineer Claire Parker, in 1930. After visiting the couple, in the 1960s, filmmaker Norman McLaren convinced the NFB to buy the instrument, which was called the Alexeïeff-Parker screen. Jacques Drouin, now deceased, former mentor of Michèle Lemieux, will then work there.
No ink or pen is used here. It is the shadow of thousands of pins, projected on a white screen, which creates the drawings. With dozens of tools of various shapes, gleaned over the years, Michèle Lemieux creates depth or relief by pushing on the heads of pins to bring out light. To trace patterns on Marie-Anne of Austria’s collar, she used small wheels from children’s cars. A star pattern was created with the bottom of an NFB chip bowl. “It’s great DIY,” she says. The result is striking.
Museum experience
Table, it is above all a reflection on painting and the museum experience. “I was 18 or 19 when I came across a reproduction of the portrait of Marie-Anne of Austria in a book where we only saw her face. I looked at this young woman, who was about my age, and I felt something in her eyes. It came for me, perhaps because of my own sadness, the sadness you can have at 18. I asked myself: “What is this miracle that, 350 years later, I look at this image, and it makes me want to cry?” I felt like I met someone. It is paint applied with brushes to the canvas. And I watch this, and I burst into tears. I told myself that what I wanted in my life was to understand the relationship between emotion and image. »
In the meantime, Michèle Lemieux became an illustrator and professor at UQAM. And his short film Table was already well underway when she was finally able to look at the Velázquez in real life, in the rooms of the Prado Museum in Madrid, last fall. Queen Marie-Anne of Austria had not aged a bit.
Film without words, Table delves into the interiority of his character, whose main vocation was to provide an heir to the crown of Spain, despite generations of consanguineous marriages. Marie-Anne of Austria herself had married her uncle Philip IV, 30 years her senior, at the age of 14.
“At 18, she had already given birth to her first child. From the age of 14 until her husband’s death, she had pregnancies and miscarriages. Only one girl will survive until the age of 21. And always in the spirit of preserving the dynasty, the power in the family, Marie-Anne of Austria will marry her to her own brother, who is also a Habsburg. » This girl will have seven children before dying in childbirth. Marie-Anne of Austria will also have a son, who becomes emperor at the age of 14, but who will not be able to have children.
In the context, “that’s what women are for, to give a family heir to the crown of Spain,” says Michèle Lemieux. Through frequent contact, Michèle Lemieux believes she has become intimate with Marie-Anne of Austria.
“Daniel Arasse, who is a French art historian, said that when we spend a lot of time in front of a painting, at a given moment, the painting rises and comes towards us. I’ve already felt that in a museum,” she says. “I’ve been looking at Velázquez’s painting for years. And I look at him like I look at someone I know. » She even probed its inner life.