In co-production with the Musée-Château d’Annecy, the Cinémathèque québécoise is presenting an exhibition until September 22 on the memorial and artistic journey of Theodore Ushev, a Bulgarian filmmaker established in Montreal since 1999. Entitled The Matter of Memorythe exhibition offers a journey through his cinematographic and visual works, and also carves out a place for literature, music and history. Enough to reflect the approach of the artist, a world leader in animated cinema.
“We knew that Theodore didn’t want to be mummified. He wanted the exhibition to be a creative act in itself,” explains Marco de Blois, co-curator of the exhibition. The Montreal team joined forces with the Annecy team to write the exhibition’s script, based on the raw material from Ushev’s archives, a linear narrative that builds to a dramatic crescendo. The Matter of Memory does not therefore seek to freeze the work of this prolific fifty-year-old filmmaker, but rather to act as a hub for his work.
Personal objects, intrinsically linked to the filmmaker’s childhood, first catch the visitor’s eye. Pencils or old stamp collections silently answer the questions posed from the outset by the exhibition, and which inhabit the rest of the journey: what do we bring, and what do we forget? Because Ushev’s life is a series of moves, of incessant movements.
This exhibition focuses on original drawings. It completely changes the viewer’s relationship with the screen, it’s really brilliant.
If the themes of the projected works feed these questions, the artistic methods used by the artist also resonate with this existential tension. This is particularly the case for encaustic, which was used for this film that Marco de Blois considers to be Ushev’s masterpiece, Physics of sadness (2019). This was the first use in cinema of this technique which consists of diluting, while hot, the colors of the paint in melted wax. By its fleeting and ephemeral aspect, this art which dates back to Egyptian Antiquity reflects the memory which disappears or is constantly altered.
According to Marc Bertrand, producer of more than ten films by Theodore Ushev at the National Film Board of Canada, the interest of the exhibition lies in the perspective it allows outside the frame, normally invisible to spectators. “This exhibition focuses on original drawings. It completely changes the spectator’s relationship with the screen, it’s really brilliant. As [Norman] McLaren said: “In animation, what’s interesting is what happens between the frames, that is to say the movement, and how you create it.” The exhibition presented at the Cinémathèque brings all of that to the forefront.
Still according to the producer, The Matter of Memory manages to brilliantly illustrate how a filmmaker from an immigrant background was able to seize the space that was his in the Montreal artistic community. “Theodore Ushev is a tormented man who saw, in what is happening here, an opportunity to create freely. There is room here for talents who come from outside,” he notes with joy.
After its resounding success at the Château d’Annecy (over 80,000 visitors showed up), the exhibition had to be adapted to the rooms of the Cinémathèque québécoise. Marie-Douce St-Jacques, head of exhibitions, was faced with the challenge of restoring the heart of this collective project to Montreal, despite a complete change in atmosphere: the exhibition went from small medieval rooms to the refined and modern ones of the Montreal institution. “We are very proud of the result,” she says, recalling Ushev’s concern for displaying his multidisciplinarity, which is undoubtedly one of the characteristic traits that have built his international reputation.
“Last year, a survey was conducted by an animation film festival in Barcelona to establish a ranking of the great contemporary animated film directors, and Theodore came first,” says Marco de Blois. “To anyone who is even remotely sensitive to cinema, Theodore Ushev is very, very, very well known.”
A committed artist
The artist’s commitment could obviously not be ignored in this exhibition, which aims to be an incursion into the meanders of Ushev’s deeply personal cinema. “Art has always been a political gesture for me. In all my films, there is a political message, except in Sleepwalker and in Demon “, revealed Theodore Ushev to Duty in May 2023, after he had just won a Moscow prize for one of his films directly opposing fascism, Phi 1.618. Shortly afterwards, he refused this prestigious distinction by sending the Russian committee a video capsule in which he states that he ” [lui] It is impossible to receive this award in a city that gives orders to kill children, women and the elderly. Everyone must choose their side, that of Good or Evil.”