62. Oberhausen Kurzfimtage: The virtual space of animation
As every year, the Oberhausen Film Festival delivers more than anyone could possibly chew or swallow. The Latin American theme screening delivered excellent insight beyond the clichés the region often loses the perspective of itself. I also missed out on the retrospective on grand Chinese animator Sun Xun. Still, I will for now focus on the animation films in the international competition.
One of the big winners of the year was Hayoun Kwon's "489 years". The film uses 3d animation to reconstruct the real testimony of a soldier on the border between South and North Korea. Of course, this reminds both of popular 1st person shooting games and of the "serious games" used for reconstruction of traumatic military situations, widely known through the work of Haroun Farocki. The director is conscious of these connections and sees it as placing her work between reality and fiction. The visions can, after all, only be true to memory and not to fact, and are mostly the imagination of an unaccessible place. Furthermore, the journey also allows itself some surreal escapes, as it dives beneath the floor or hovers above the sky. The voice of the interviewed person and its editing combine with this into stimulating storytelling.
Kwon also places her work between medial boundaries, as she in fact has developed a VR version in which the public can look around themselves freely to explore this virtual space of memory. Even so, with the shooting game as a constant reference, not a single shot is fired in the film. It is merely the tension, the sense of awe and wonder, that grows to dominate the entire situation. The film approaches the sense of the sacred as monstrous, overwhelming and fascinating: precisely because of the fear it represents, the area has also become a natural paradise. The atrocity of the untouchable space appears as necessary to the sustainment of a tense cease fire. The freedom of the animals that inhabit it is only possible at the expense of constant danger. Finally, the fear the narrator has faced also proves a toll for the intense memories he cherishes.
A very different transmedia project was Okaku Noriko's "The Interpreter". In a residence in English Derbyshire the artist combined contemporary pictures of the locations with historical etchings from magazines and penny dreadfulls. Thus, she also opens a fantastic space, a reconstruction of reality in between times. The collage takes two shapes: it manifests both as film and as cards. The cards, and many of the motifs within the images, are inspired by the major arcana of tarot, although they take these forms freely to keep an open dialogue with the location and, most importantly, the viewer. The interpreter is not only central in Okaku's title but, as tarot practitioners know, also the goal in the use of cards: it is in connecting the dissimilar images and their riddles that one may achieve a meditation leading to self knowledge. In that sense, the game of tarot is a collage at a different level, one that reconfigures itself with every spread to challenge the consciousness of the interpreter anew. On the other hand, the animated film is a liquid visualization of what is commonly known as "the fool's journey". It shows the flow between and among the cards, emphasizing that there is nothing set and nothing isolated in them.
The Interpreter from Animate Projects on Vimeo.
Ohtakara Hitomi's "Omokagetayuta" was not transmedial, but mixed media in the more traditional sense. Combining techniques already has a stable position in painting, but is harder to come by in animation. Combining video, drawings, photography and stop motion requires, after all, a multitalented hand. The theme of the film, the attempt to reconstruct the memory of a long lost person, reflects in its polyphonic images, which must also be pieced together through imagination. This becomes more intense through some abstract but relatable symbols, like the sticky blot that wanders unnoticed through the house.
Another Japanese animator who was unfortunately not present but delivered a remarkable work was Okawara Ryo. His piece had the strange title 「テ゛ィス゛イス゛マイハウス」, which actually is just "This is my house" in katakana. It is precisely the problems of dysfunctional homes and families, but also its connection to even more widespread social problems, which the film addresses. The iconic pictures and strong colors contrast with the slowness and silentness of the characters. The ever present image of the burning house stands for the visible manifestations of discrimination and misdirection. In the characters of the film, however, it only brings out the indifference or cynicism that are painfully familiar to modern society. One ought to wonder if the black humor of the film is not itself, too, caught in the cynicism it represents. Be it as it may, at least it screams out the silent voices of burning problems which are more present then one likes to admit.
The last participant Japanese animator was Ogawa Iku, who adapted one of the most bizarre tales of the Grimms into stop motion animation. The base material is "Die Wunderliche Gästerei" which, as the director mentioned, was removed from later editions of the Collection for being inappropriate for children. "I think you're a little confused" plays decidedly with black humor, grotesque shapes and a somber yet hilarious atmosphere. The oddness of the nonsense tale allows for intriguing images like a scared sausage being squashed between a happy and a sad face.
One of my personal favorites was Renata Gąsiorowska's "Cipka". In a context of ever recurring misogynist conservatism, this short sets a clear radical voice for freedom and self appreciation. One might label the representation of masturbation as feminist pornography, but on the other hand the cartoonish style frees it from any conventional sexualized perspective. It is rather humor and creativity that stand in the central point, finding new forms to describe the female experience, forms that also go beyond most boundaries of what could be said and shown before. Also for men and anyone else, the film is a liberating impulse to rethink our bodies.
Another group that made itself noticed with their highly intellectual works and opinions were the heirs of Croatian avant-garde. They delivered a couple of pieces that they described as anti-animation: the images were created in programs for architecture design and had therefore no movement of their own, but consisted in the camera exploring the spaces.
Tomislav Ŝoban's "Kraj" leads from total darkness into total whiteness. In between, there are paradox images of contrasts. From the resources of architecture, Ŝoban choses one which is not such: trees. These, however, appear alternately inside and outside structures. If infinite space is circular, can something be the center and the border at the same time? As anything "post-" Ŝoban also conceives of his anti-animation as a borderline that is still part of animation. His precise mathematic contradiction reminds of a borgian meditation.
Darko Fritz draws from the same source for his work "Novi Juẑni Zagreb", which however also has a strong documentary component. Fritz represents the expansion of the city that was conceived by the Yugoslavian government as a communist utopia in the 60s. Utopia in this case has no relation to beauty, but to novelty and, especially, to that which is disconnected from all antecedents, alienating in its purity. The film superposes with great precision videos of scale models, real footage and computer models of the same locations, showing the fast and radical transformation of the area. The brutalist concrete blocks grow out of completely empty lands with a gigantic, arbitrary and dehumanizing power. Fritz's own work as he describes it is not prone to human sensitivity either: what we see is edited by mathematical algorithms which determine that the length of each image be relative to the others and form a particular progression.
This dreamed city of the future resounds strongly with another short shown right next to it: "Entretempos" by Yuri Firmeza and Federico Benevides takes on institutional animations that serve as propaganda for the constructions for the olympic games in Rio de Janeiro. The film estranges the images distorting them and focusing on their arbitrary, absurd details. The building machines dance frenziedly to the rhythm of slave songs that remind the bloody history of the ground they are building upon. Finally, the camera brings us to the fabled "family of the future". They live just next to the great stadium, but instead of looking out of the window, they watch TV. They are spectators, like us. But they are also disturbingly white and are all eating endlessly from huge bowls of popcorn with a spasmodic, compulsive drive. It's not as scary to think that this is the future that most governments try to sell as, than it is to watch ourselves buying into it. A very different question that also arises is: is this still animation? Or is it rather re-animation of images that reveal themselves as undead, the exorcism of the ghosts of the future, anti-animation?
One of the big winners of the year was Hayoun Kwon's "489 years". The film uses 3d animation to reconstruct the real testimony of a soldier on the border between South and North Korea. Of course, this reminds both of popular 1st person shooting games and of the "serious games" used for reconstruction of traumatic military situations, widely known through the work of Haroun Farocki. The director is conscious of these connections and sees it as placing her work between reality and fiction. The visions can, after all, only be true to memory and not to fact, and are mostly the imagination of an unaccessible place. Furthermore, the journey also allows itself some surreal escapes, as it dives beneath the floor or hovers above the sky. The voice of the interviewed person and its editing combine with this into stimulating storytelling.Kwon also places her work between medial boundaries, as she in fact has developed a VR version in which the public can look around themselves freely to explore this virtual space of memory. Even so, with the shooting game as a constant reference, not a single shot is fired in the film. It is merely the tension, the sense of awe and wonder, that grows to dominate the entire situation. The film approaches the sense of the sacred as monstrous, overwhelming and fascinating: precisely because of the fear it represents, the area has also become a natural paradise. The atrocity of the untouchable space appears as necessary to the sustainment of a tense cease fire. The freedom of the animals that inhabit it is only possible at the expense of constant danger. Finally, the fear the narrator has faced also proves a toll for the intense memories he cherishes.
A very different transmedia project was Okaku Noriko's "The Interpreter". In a residence in English Derbyshire the artist combined contemporary pictures of the locations with historical etchings from magazines and penny dreadfulls. Thus, she also opens a fantastic space, a reconstruction of reality in between times. The collage takes two shapes: it manifests both as film and as cards. The cards, and many of the motifs within the images, are inspired by the major arcana of tarot, although they take these forms freely to keep an open dialogue with the location and, most importantly, the viewer. The interpreter is not only central in Okaku's title but, as tarot practitioners know, also the goal in the use of cards: it is in connecting the dissimilar images and their riddles that one may achieve a meditation leading to self knowledge. In that sense, the game of tarot is a collage at a different level, one that reconfigures itself with every spread to challenge the consciousness of the interpreter anew. On the other hand, the animated film is a liquid visualization of what is commonly known as "the fool's journey". It shows the flow between and among the cards, emphasizing that there is nothing set and nothing isolated in them.
The Interpreter from Animate Projects on Vimeo.
Ohtakara Hitomi's "Omokagetayuta" was not transmedial, but mixed media in the more traditional sense. Combining techniques already has a stable position in painting, but is harder to come by in animation. Combining video, drawings, photography and stop motion requires, after all, a multitalented hand. The theme of the film, the attempt to reconstruct the memory of a long lost person, reflects in its polyphonic images, which must also be pieced together through imagination. This becomes more intense through some abstract but relatable symbols, like the sticky blot that wanders unnoticed through the house.
Another Japanese animator who was unfortunately not present but delivered a remarkable work was Okawara Ryo. His piece had the strange title 「テ゛ィス゛イス゛マイハウス」, which actually is just "This is my house" in katakana. It is precisely the problems of dysfunctional homes and families, but also its connection to even more widespread social problems, which the film addresses. The iconic pictures and strong colors contrast with the slowness and silentness of the characters. The ever present image of the burning house stands for the visible manifestations of discrimination and misdirection. In the characters of the film, however, it only brings out the indifference or cynicism that are painfully familiar to modern society. One ought to wonder if the black humor of the film is not itself, too, caught in the cynicism it represents. Be it as it may, at least it screams out the silent voices of burning problems which are more present then one likes to admit.The last participant Japanese animator was Ogawa Iku, who adapted one of the most bizarre tales of the Grimms into stop motion animation. The base material is "Die Wunderliche Gästerei" which, as the director mentioned, was removed from later editions of the Collection for being inappropriate for children. "I think you're a little confused" plays decidedly with black humor, grotesque shapes and a somber yet hilarious atmosphere. The oddness of the nonsense tale allows for intriguing images like a scared sausage being squashed between a happy and a sad face.
One of my personal favorites was Renata Gąsiorowska's "Cipka". In a context of ever recurring misogynist conservatism, this short sets a clear radical voice for freedom and self appreciation. One might label the representation of masturbation as feminist pornography, but on the other hand the cartoonish style frees it from any conventional sexualized perspective. It is rather humor and creativity that stand in the central point, finding new forms to describe the female experience, forms that also go beyond most boundaries of what could be said and shown before. Also for men and anyone else, the film is a liberating impulse to rethink our bodies.Another group that made itself noticed with their highly intellectual works and opinions were the heirs of Croatian avant-garde. They delivered a couple of pieces that they described as anti-animation: the images were created in programs for architecture design and had therefore no movement of their own, but consisted in the camera exploring the spaces.
Darko Fritz draws from the same source for his work "Novi Juẑni Zagreb", which however also has a strong documentary component. Fritz represents the expansion of the city that was conceived by the Yugoslavian government as a communist utopia in the 60s. Utopia in this case has no relation to beauty, but to novelty and, especially, to that which is disconnected from all antecedents, alienating in its purity. The film superposes with great precision videos of scale models, real footage and computer models of the same locations, showing the fast and radical transformation of the area. The brutalist concrete blocks grow out of completely empty lands with a gigantic, arbitrary and dehumanizing power. Fritz's own work as he describes it is not prone to human sensitivity either: what we see is edited by mathematical algorithms which determine that the length of each image be relative to the others and form a particular progression.
This dreamed city of the future resounds strongly with another short shown right next to it: "Entretempos" by Yuri Firmeza and Federico Benevides takes on institutional animations that serve as propaganda for the constructions for the olympic games in Rio de Janeiro. The film estranges the images distorting them and focusing on their arbitrary, absurd details. The building machines dance frenziedly to the rhythm of slave songs that remind the bloody history of the ground they are building upon. Finally, the camera brings us to the fabled "family of the future". They live just next to the great stadium, but instead of looking out of the window, they watch TV. They are spectators, like us. But they are also disturbingly white and are all eating endlessly from huge bowls of popcorn with a spasmodic, compulsive drive. It's not as scary to think that this is the future that most governments try to sell as, than it is to watch ourselves buying into it. A very different question that also arises is: is this still animation? Or is it rather re-animation of images that reveal themselves as undead, the exorcism of the ghosts of the future, anti-animation?
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