Bell Canada Award in Video Art: The “beautiful journey” of Serge Murphy and Charles Guilbert

Blending reality with fantasy, Montreal video artists Serge Murphy and Charles Guilbert have for the past two decades created works that both capture the human experience and release the human imagination.

Beginning with their first collaboration in 1987 — the French-language art video, Le Garçon du fleuriste [The Florist’s Boy] — the duo rely on sound (speech, song and music) and humour in a narrative-experimental style of storytelling within a rich tableau of often surrealistic imagery.

In the 1990 video, Sois sage ô ma douleur (et tiens-toi plus tranquille) [Be Good O My Sorrow] — which won the best video prize at the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois in 1991 — Murphy and Guilbert shine a spotlight on various social interactions: two friends search for new topics of conversation; a couple gently bickers.

“We focus on everyday themes, such as love and relationships – straight and gay – as well as difficulties people have in communicating, which is set against a backdrop of characters strange in some way by their dress or gestures in order to create tension,” explains Guilbert. He credits director and editor Michel Grou and Patrick Lafond, who scores the music, with helping to create the cutting-edge videos.

In the 1992 documentary-like video, Le Bal des Anguilles [The Dance of Eels], people share stories about the fleeting moments of daily life that are transformed into extraordinary events: a hotel keeper takes in a sailor in distress; a man is pursued by a little cloud of odour; a woman believes she possesses a magic ring.

Making seemingly simple situations complex has become their artistic signature. L’Homme au trésor (1988) [The Treasure Man, subtitled in English], for example, opens in a poetry class with the characters reading love poems. One of the participants, who is deeply moved by the words, abruptly leaves and sets in motion a series of stories involving propositions, heartbreak and break-up among those remaining.

The couple’s critically-acclaimed videos, which have been produced through Montreal-based Vidéographe and broadcast on French-language television around the world, have just earned them the Canada Council’s 2004 Bell Canada Award in Video Art, a $10,000-prize (presented in Montreal in February 2005).

Inasmuch as the multi-layered videos incorporate various visual and audio elements, the men behind the work are multi-talented, multidisciplinary artists.

Born in Montreal in 1953, Murphy holds a master’s degree in design from the Université de Paris VIII, works as a sculptor and teaches visual arts at a CEGEP in Laval, Que. Guilbert, who is also a singer and songwriter, was born in Montreal in 1964 and earned a master’s degree in French literature from the Université du Québec à Montréal. In 1993, Montreal-based Les Herbes rouges published his collection of short stories, Les Inquiets.

Guilbert also wrote the text and Murphy drew the images for their first joint literary project, also in French, Le Beau voyage éducatif, which was published in 2004 by Dazibao.

- Christopher Guly