Boom, dream, flow: A look at Independent Exposure's animationBy Maria Komodore
The exact moment when I decided to study cinema is very clearly imprinted in my memory. It occurred three years ago while I was watching Man Ray films.
What impressed me most about films such as Return to Reason, Ballet Mécanique, and Emak Bakia was the potential they seemed to add to the film medium. Strange, almost indistinguishable forms and shapes danced around on the screen to generate equally mysterious inner associations. Though at times this colorful and playful montage of images didn’t make sense, at least not in the conventional way that films are supposed to make sense, they had deep impact on my perception.
Independent Exposure's Animation Edition 2007 —a series of short animations series that Microcinema Inc. has compiled on DVD and will also be showing all around the world—made me relive that moment. All fifteen shorts are exceptional not only for their subjects and the imaginative manner in which they're treated, but also simply for their aesthetic value.
In Habitat, a Swedish film by Lars Arrhenuis, clear, bold, straight and round lines are employed to provide a subtractive representation of people in an urban setting, and to express their lonely and communication-deprived existence.
The three movies that Lev Yilmaz made under the general title Tales of Mere Existence II -- Ready, How to Cope with Depression, and(I’m Not Going to Think About Her -- focus on everyday problems such as breakups and feeling unmotivated or down. The rather silly looking and simple drawings keep getting redesigned on the screen. Jjuxtaposed with the voice-over, they create a humorous account of the ways people think about these problems, how we deal with them, and the obstacles that we sometimes create for ourselves.
Chel White’s A Painful Glimpse Into My Writing Process also examines how people cope with inner struggles, using the example of the psychic preparation that takes place inside a writer’s mind. The collage-style editing of what appear to be irrelevant pictures -- which nonetheless accord with the writer’s state of mind -- prepares the viewer for the stream of consciousness logic that dictates the rest of the film series.
Startle Pattern, by Eric Patrick, and Giocattoli Futuristi, by Claudio Castelli, are extraordinarily adventurous in their representations. Patrick's short explores the state of spectatorship today by making its clay protagonist abandon his film-enclosed world and confront his creator. Giocattolli Futuristi brings to mind an era when movies were influenced by and responsive to general art movements, reflecting the work of Futurist Italian artist Fortunato Depero. With its harsh, flat, and strictly-angled shapes, faint colors, and naturally induced sounds, Castelli's short presents a gloomy industrialized world where people struggle with conscience and consciousness.
The limits of filmic representation are pushed even further by Paul Fletcher's Dreamlake, and particularly by Outflow Part I, created by Daniel Carvalho of Brazil. Australia's Fletcher, taking as his starting point a lake, combines his dreams and memories in a superimposition of drawings. But it’s Outflow that achieves a complete filmic deconstruction, reducing the form to its basics. There is no story, no space, no time, no pretext whatsoever -- only forms that keep changing shape and color and which somehow manage to be simultaneously organic and mechanical.
Independent Exposure 2007: Documentary Addition (and Asociated Program: Animation Edition 2007)
August 27, 8 p.m.
111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna, SF
415.974.1719
www.independentexposure.com
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