Primarily my visual inspiration for this project came from experimental filmmakers and animators, many of whom work in a mixed media format, like myself. I wanted to stay true to my own style but at the same time move away from the look of my previous film – in working with a lot of the same mediums and methods, I was running the risk of creating something very similar.
Songs and Dances of the Inanimate World: The Subway, by Pierre Hébert
Using a combination of direct animation and very slowly animated stills of charcoal drawings, Pierre Hébert worked with musicians Robert Lepage and René Lussier to create a visceral exploration of the dehumanising experience of the urban subway. The film is striking in its contrast between the incessant movement of the animation and eerie stillness of the charcoal drawings as they fade in and out of one another; it creates anticipation of change in the viewer, and the visual contrast of the dark vs light backgrounds only adds to this sensation. Duality is an interesting concept in shorts such as these, and is something I wanted to keep in mind for my own work.
Les négatifs de McLaren, by Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre
'McLaren's Negatives' is a 2006 animated short exploring the life of Norman McLaren and examining his particular filmmaking philosophies. I came across this film whist reading through ‘Re-imaginging animation: The Changing Face of the Moving Image’ by Paul Wells and Johnny Hardstaff, in the section Re-Animating History/Re-Defining Practice. On Saint-Pierre's blend of multiple animating and filmmaking methods, they write that she "effectively collapses McLaren's techniques into one process, making the subjective interrogation of McLaren's art a model of understanding about how a contemporary artist has absorbed and reflected on his influence. Her main intention, however, was not to essentially document Mclaren, but to preserve and extend the notion of memory. Many aspects of life are often forgotten and these reinventions or re-imaginings of people, lives, relationships, spaces, environments and experiences are effectively acts of remembering – new records of significant knowledge and practice, which are threatened with effacement by time. Animated virtual histories resist this process. Saint-Pierre, even by working with film, insists upon an act of preservation – the film is treated as a physical material, handled like a sculptor's stone, or a furniture maker's piece of wood. McLaren's Negatives introduces a new generation to Norman McLaren and to the idea of traditional film-making, itself rapidly receding in the post-photographic era."
In addition to this, Saint-Pierre's use of actual interview audio with McLaren himself was what spurred me on in tracking down the interview material which I eventually was able to use in the film, courtesy of Jonny Trunk.
Peter Tscherkassky
An experimental film-maker who often works with found footage, Tscherkassky was someone I came across again in Re-Imagining Animation. Whilst not necessarily being an animator, Tscherkassky's use of editing as his primary (and often only) method of construction appeals to my preffered way of working – using found footage is an exercise in letting the material dictate the direction of the film-making process, as opposed to tradition live action work. Tscherkassky states in Re-Imagining Animation that he loves "the limitations of the given material: instead of constantly making choices of what to film, what not to film, how long to let the camera roll, etc, you have to explore a pre-existing structure, and you have to discover what is already there." This also contrasts metaphorically with animation – where foud footage editing relies entirely on this 'pre-existing structure,' aniamtion as a medium involves building images and movements from the ground up, giving you complete creative control. This juxtaposition is something I have come to rely on heavily in my own practice in exploring the boundaries between mediums and eras in technology.
These images, from Tscherkassky's film tabula rasa, served as some inital visual inspiration for some of the formatting of my film – windows of action and on-screen type. Further than this, however, tabula rasa is also a perfect example of practice as research and research as practice; taken from Tscherkassky's website, Gabriele Jutz writes that "the target of tabula rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the precondition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz (based on the psychoanalytical theory by Jacques Lacan) has established in theory is rendered as film in tabula rasa."
Other films of Tscherkassky's that I watched in preparation for this project:
Outer Space
tabula rasa
Happy End
The Exquisite Corpus
Manufracture
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine
FLUKE by Emily Breer
From Emily Breer's website: 'A shark yawns and a fish flies on the head of a camel driver in the desert. The roof of a house constantly flies away while another takes its place. Images like these are insignificant in nature, but they create sequences that do not illustrate a central theme. The subject of FLUKE is the process of exploiting images and sequences by searching for the origin of a central theme.'
The complete barrage of images in this film were an inspiration for the breakdown in my own film, when the tapes are underwater and the vaguely melodic opening of The Order of Time starts to break down into the field recording-based noise music.
The full film can bee seen here.
The Great White Silence
The Great White Silence is a BFI archival restoraton of the legendary documentation of the ill-fated Captain Scott's South Pole Expedition.
Once again looking at archives and their loss/restoration, I was drawn to this film by its sense of being out-of-time; the obviously old footage is tonally contrasted by the brightly coloured tints (an originally planned feature in 1924) and the BFI restoration soundtrack of ambient, minimal synths and traditional folk music, all scored by Simon Fisher Turner.
The film itself, while being an example of saving an archive from loss, is itself a documentation of loss – whilst initially an exploration of the journey and the day-to-day goings on of the crew's scientific investigations, once the expedition to the pole is embarked on by Scott and co. the film turns into a narrative of lost life, and ends as an obituary or sorts, with formal potraits of each of the men lost.
Esther Johnson (Blanche Films)
Similarly to Tscherkassky, I explored Johnson's films as a whole as opposed to looking at one specific example, as her methods and focuses are very much in line with my own.
Taken from her website: 'Esther’s poetic portraits focus on alternative social histories and marginal worlds to reveal resonant stories that may otherwise remain hidden or ignored. Recurring themes include social narratives, personal histories, notions of testament and memory, heritage, folklore, regeneration, an exploration of architectural vernaculars and the inhabited environment. Projects include socially engaged work that draws on oral testimony, experience, and politics to look at how the universal impacts on the individual. Other works have repositioned archival material as a way of addressing the relationship between history, memory and storytelling.'
The draw in Esther's work for me is exactly this – there is such a personal and deeply invested feeling to all of her films (or the short snippets I have been able to find) which is compounded by the use of personal oral and visual histories as the primary method of storytelling. It often feels as though Esther is simply the vehicle for the stories to be told, as opposed to her imposing her own narrative onto the subjects. Ultimately this is where I would like my own practice to head both in terms of atmosphere and focus and also with regards to her position within the wider field of film-making; the majority of her films have been commisions from various instiutions and cultural bodies who feel that she can help them in telling a story they don't want forgotten.
The three films/trailers for films that I found most inspiring were Asunder, Tune In, and Its Quicker By Hearse, The Tale of the Petitioning Housewife, the Protesting Schoolboy and the Campaign Trail Student.
Feliks Topolski & John Singer Sargent
For the drawings I decided on partway through production, I mostly leant into my own intuitive style which has developed over the past three years of the course, but it would be remiss to not acknowledge that I was somewhat cosciously inspired by both Topolski and Sargent. Topolski's animated linework and borderline-caricature style portraits have been inspiring me to push my own drawings into having a visceral sense of life and movement, whislt Sargent's focus on light and shadow and his often visible markmaking create a palpable volume in his subjects which I always strive to emulate.
コメント