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Literature as a source of both rational and non-rational understanding

Characteristic examples of the transposition of a literary text into the "idiom" of a classically conceived animation are several highly successful works by Alexander Petrov. His most recent film, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, also screened in Leipzig, was an Oscar winner in 2000. This laborious, technically exacting and artistically perfect film utilises, in addition to literally quoted dialogue (and inner monologue), action scenes that could most probably be found in any recent Hollywood version of Hemingway's text (wrestling with the caught fish and sharks filmed at water level, approaching waves and the sea tinged by blood). This amply demonstrates animation's ability to produce such realistic or rather naturalist pictures - yet by specifically representing things actually only "fathomed", such animation substantially weakens the inner dimension of the text, this famous major part of the iceberg hidden below the surface, for Hemingway always extremely important. In his poetically conceived underwater scenes and dreamlike visions Petrov has totally abandoned art distance, actually to such a degree that he borders on kitsch. In her film YOUR PUSHKIN Oksana Tcherkassova approached the classical text so as to preserve a sufficiently wide manoeuvring space. In the film everybody talks of Pushkin, everybody has some personal tale, which connects him/her with the poet's life or work. The image matches very well this approach - it is conceived in two moving planes, the second one not only moving but also out of focus. In consequence the colour scheme tends to be monochrome. I have no idea whether the rapid zooms that brings the viewer from the street to the open palace gates corresponds to some "Pushkin-like" alteration of planes, but it certainly has its cinematographic significance. After all, the reality of social rituals, watched from above by floating cupids (from the director's point of view the life span of these idols is a single ephemeral day), has always been and remains to this day both empty and comical. The film CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (Zbrodnia i kara), which its director Piotr Dumala was planning for many years, has a literary inspiration par excellence. It is perhaps worth mentioning that several years ago Dumala made a film based on excerpts of Kafka' Diaries. This time he put on the screen Dostoyevski's best-known work for full thirty minutes - in animation certainly a lot. There is not a single informative sentence or title in the entire film. Raskolnikov's feelings and Dostoyevski's ideas (e.g. the insert of a runaway horse) are transmitted by a very sober, monochrome image. Everything that takes place in his vicinity is for the roused conscience of the hero perhaps even more important than in the novel - therefore enormous close-ups of a crawling fly, which signify not only despair but possibly also fate and the passing of time. Another adaptation of a Russian classic, which however fully respects the simple linear story-telling principle, is Aurel Klimt's THE FALL (Pad), the only Czech representative in the competition. Charms's specific humour found an appropriate equivalent in Klimt's (and Pos's) puppet version of the story of a drunkard, who slips on the roof and then holds onto the gutter, "where he probably remains hanging to this day". Inactivity, a tendency towards meditation and contemplation, these characteristics of the "broad Russian soul" at the very moment when action is called for, need no words in either Klimt's or Dumala's story. The last interesting experiment on a literary motif I want to mention is THE MAN WITH BEAUTIFUL EYES, Charles Bukowski's poem adapted for the cinema by Jonathan Hodgson. The text of the poem (about the superiority children feel upon meeting a person rejected by society), which dominates the sound component, is illustrated with considerable freedom. The image itself comes close to the perception of children and to the principles of a game, a game with signs and letters, which upsets routine and sheds a special light on the principles of communication. AT WORLD'S END (Et hjoerne av verden), Piotr Sapegin's short parody on the theme of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Shakespeare's personages represented by two frogs somewhere near the North Cape (Nordkapp), is literary only as far as the author of the text is concerned. It is not so much a question of poetry or drama as of three-dimensional animation with the picture of a real landscape, filmed frame by frame. The director used yet another procedure, which is classical in animation - and that is the personification of animal protagonists.

A reindeer pack, humour and mysticism

The real godfather of Richard Goleszowski's HOOVES OF FIRE, which also works with personification, is no hero from Aesop's fables - and neither is it Disney's famous Micky Mouse. Without a shadow of doubt, however, the author found his inspiration in Nick Park's films. Not only do Goleszowski's reindeer, competing for a place in the team of Santa Claus, speak the same English as Wallace and Grommit (a faultless lip synch technique is natural), but even their behaviour and principles are somewhat similar. Actually, personification found its way into many other films, e.g. into Jonas Raeber's CREDO about a Swiss sheep under the spell of a rock'n'roll band and with purely human motives. In such ambitious films as Garri Bardin's ADAGIO, stories of animal figures that brilliantly parody human virtues and vices become generally valid, more or less abstract statements. In the case of Garri Bardin, famous chiefly for his action humour, invariably in the foreground, this is a far too obvious excess, unmistakable even in a spectacularly "aesthetic" artistic solution. The personages of his film, grey birds such as children fold from paper, advance with bent heads against a strong wind. The figure of a leader who suddenly emerges from the crowd endows their movement with meaning and direction. In the Promised Land, an oasis of peace and quiet, the flock suddenly realises that the leader's feathers are snow-white - and, as could be expected, they peck the rare bird to death. Bardin, however, does not end there. Ascension lends greater significance to the erstwhile Messiah. The pecked-to-death bird becomes a symbol (its significance emphasised by an unnatural white light) adored by all the birds in the flock - by all but one, this time a black raven, who will obviously meet with a similar fate... In a play with human figures Ferenc Cako comes closest to such a statement - and this time most appropriately - in his VISION (Vizio). The director once more resorts to very sober scenography. The Tower of Babel, which humankind is building according to the instructions of some visionary, is constructed of hundreds connected ladders - a rather original scenographic solution. The subsequent struggle for power is, in fact, a fight for the place on top. The aggressors are steadily more numerous and, naturally, the "visionary" structure collapses - in this instance, especially in view of the "dream", from which the construction originated, actually more than a simple metaphor.

Dreams, lucid dreams and rituals

A child's eyes widened by horror, that is Regina Pesoa's idea of the night, LA NOITE, and of dreams. Pavor nocturnus, projected on the retina of the chief protagonist (in addition to abstract images there is a fleeting picture of his mother in the arms of some man) is not exactly an original, but actually a true vision. The boy who saw the iceberg - Paul Driessen In Paul Driessen's THE BOY WHO SAW THE ICEBERG (Silver Dove) we have a seemingly quite innocent lucid dream of a pubescent. Driessen makes full use of approaches that have more often than not served him well. He situates reality into the left part of the image and day-dreaming into the right part. The two communicate in a true Driessen fashion: they influence one another, they either copy or negate one another. The protagonist's wild boyish dreams, obviously taking place at an unsuitable moment, are most impressive, although with Driessen we have seen already several times something of this kind. The iceberg the boy glimpses from the deck of a ship, on board of which he travels with his parents, is unfortunately genuine - and thus in the end vision and reality merge. In Andreas Hykade's RING OF FIRE we find a dream of an entirely different kind. The irrational pilgrimage of the author's "midnight" cowboys, charged with suppressed sexual desire, abounds in danger, violence and almost undefinable symbols. The stylised black-and-white drawings and sophisticated animation, which comes close to "dance steps", place the RING OF FIRE among irrational, almost surrealist-like actions. Using several leitmotifs that repeat themselves (burning fire, sound of steps and floating dress of the femme fatale, the provocatively half-open door of the caravan) act as attributes of a challenge that has additionally also an entirely real, though unmistakably stylised form. The strange, somewhat Picasso-like picture of another girl (naked, with flying hair and half-open vulva) indicates the as yet not properly explored depths of the subconscious, especially when in the end her only "apparel" is a belt with a gun. I mention this detail primarily in connection with the next film, in which its author, Michele Cournoyer, tackles a similar subject from a feminist point of view. Her THE HAT (Le Chapeau) also uses black-and-white contour drawings. Against the background of an erotic dance performed by a strip artist Michele Cournoyer unmasks, as she believes, the principles of manipulation, whose victims are women in Western society. A man's hat and its metamorphoses (also a leitmotif) are an attribute that brutally and hypocritically both covers and uncovers the woman. The male eyes that watch the strip artist and the hands that try to grab her as well as a stylised representation of sexual abuse in childhood and open sexual symbols (the girl climbing an erect penis, the subsequently indicated coitus and erotically conceived girl's lips with a cigarette) - all this points to a clearly defined moral attitude, with dreams and rituals only acting as stand-ins.

Musical composition

A totally different attitude is that of Oliver Harrison in his musical clip with Deanna Durbin, LOVE IS ALL. This pleasing film offers the picture of woman as a yearning being, who dreams of spring and love fully in the spirit of classical Hollywood concepts. From the point of view of post-modern manipulation with reality (deliberately "quoted" kitsch) it could be given an ironic tinge, yet I very much doubt whether anybody could "read" Harrison's film in this manner - and such a "reading" could never be considered as primary. While the title just mentioned totally lacks humour, Bill Plympton in his film sketches is never short of it. His gospel CAN'T DRAG RACE WITH JESUS, conceived as a performance of a rock'n'roll star, in this instance Jesus Christ himself with a chorus of saints, is a literal and ironic illustration of the biblical text. In the increasingly mad race Christ's car gradually sheds all unnecessary and too earthly components, to become in the end a shining comet. Most films, in which the relationship of image and music is conceived as a "dialogue" of two equivalent components, naturally tend towards more abstract statements. Some films come close to dance - e.g. BODy RHyTHM (director Wayne Traudt), with its transition from simple contour drawings to more complex shapes and colours (a frequently repeated form is a circle or sphere), others - such as HUNGARIAN PICTURES - SLIGHTLY WET (Magyar Kepek - Kicsit Azottan, director Miklos Varga) - are only inspired by music and tend to emphasise composition or architectural elements. In this specific case these elements are chiefly the streets of a big city, investigated from the point of view of mathematical canons, fully accepted in art since the Renaissance and fully valid in architecture and music until now. A totally different case are purely abstract films, e.g. the picture SHARE BROTHERS (director Guillame Le Gouil), shown in Leipzig. The film explores the possibilities of synchronising leaders for Abstract Expressionism. We could almost speak of some sort of batik, of Pollock-like drip painting, of visuality inspired by technological photography and possibly even of lettrism. According to the author, image and form replace the script and (experimental) music stands in for dialogue. The most frequent - and obviously most interesting - coexistence of music and image are films, in which specific and abstract images penetrate and supplement one another, as in Richard Reeve's SEA SONG. Views of a lighthouse and of marine motifs - medusas, fish and plankton - undergo, literally before our eyes, a process of abstraction. Similar transformations are the lot of sound (the constantly present sound of the tide), which is "harmonised", yet has but little in common with a classical musical composition. Among the best works in this group is the TUNING OF INSTRUMENTS (Strojenie instrumentow - Sparkasse Leipzig Award). The well-known Polish director Jerzy Kucia about his somewhat Proust-like film says: "The action is composed of human experiences and emotions which result from the attempts of returning to past. Dramaturgy and language of the film base on connections between picture and sound, between music and tone effects. The title arises from the search of all relations building the film..." A human figure in some empty, virtual space is blindly looking for the source of sound. As soon as he finds it, he enters a world of coded symbols, structures, lattices and logograms. These "notions" are then made visible to the protagonist, as objects - such as we know (or don't know) - from our everyday experience (an apple falls upward). In the end they once more lose, just as memories of childhood, their specific form and aspect and, finally, disappear completely.

Statements about space

Communication with the environment, the actual beginning of Kucia's TUNING OF INSTRUMENTS, is the dominant theme of many films. An orthodox film of this kind was ITCH (joint direction, animation, script - E. Bush, M. Haddon and M. Morrison). With neurotic images combining abstraction, takes of the body and natural material, it wants to express the dislocation of civilisation, which is steadily drifting away from a natural environment. This is also true of Ian Toewse's experimental picture FOUR CORNERS, which takes us to the original home of the Indian Navajo tribe, today unfortunately a country full of radioactivity. The perception of the image is substantially influenced by perfect sound recording, which exploits the characteristic ether clicks, that in turn enhance the nervous image filmed with a hand camera, the rapid editing and superimposing of titles. In a fairly large group of films space is considered as the catalyst of communication or as an active information channel that adjusts communication to its own image. When we see in William Kentridge's STEREOSCOPE on the screen "two complementary, but asynchronous realities", it is entirely logical that the blue ray entering the film's black-and-white world and reviving things, should not respect such a division of the image. In Raimund Krumme's THE MESSAGE the following communication is sent into space: "He came back." The content of this simple sentence is then transformed in line with the personality of either the receiver of the message or of the person that passes it on. In Absentia - Quay Brothers We find a similar message in the film of the Brothers Quay IN ABSENTIA (Gold Dove). Somewhat untraditionally, light itself is animated or "moved about"; its sudden changes in a window somewhere high up create a dramatic exposition. Stockhausen's music substantially adds to the picture's atmosphere. In a light mist we see a broken pencil-lead, pencils, sharpener and dirty fingers intent upon writing some message - and all that in extremely large close-ups. The stopped clock with a cracked dial creates the impression that something highly significant is taking place out of the image. When the woman, the film's only protagonist bends down under the table, we see for the first (and last) time her face. It seems that much time has passed by... In the very end we see the drawers of a writing desk, many pencils and the title informing about dedication to E.H., who lived in an asylum and from there wrote to her husband: "Sweetheart, come."

Life in the street

While in Quay's IN ABSENTIA space is for the most part reduced to almost abstract macro close-ups, most of the British experimental picture FERMENT (director Tim Macmillan) takes place in the street. An elderly man suddenly and quite unexpectedly collapses to the ground and time stands still. At that very moment the camera sets out on a pilgrimage of nearby pavements, it enters interiors through windows, takes note of immobile people in a restaurant, of stationary cars and of birds arrested in their flight. The view is both sophisticated simplicity and spectacular show. The return to the regime of an ordinary day comes with the birth a new-born. In his DIARY (Tagebuch) Vuk Jevremovic looks at the city with the subjective eyes of a true documentarist. The nervous black-and-white drawing simulates the rambling movement of the walking camera - and the sound is also moody and changing. The unity of style of the author's confession is only disrupted by an unnecessary touch of colour, which "revives" several static takes. FILM WITH A GIRL (Film s djevojcicom) of Croatian director Daniel Suljic actually also takes place in the street. This morality play about a naughty girl with a ball, drawn with a characteristic "careless" pencil, ends with the unexpected discovery of another world somewhere beyond the black hole. While with Suljic this motif is not properly exploited, in the black grotesque INTOLERANCE of British director Phil Mulloy it is by far the most dominant element. On Earth people are scandalised by reports of a civilisation on the planet Zog, especially as the inhabitants of Zog resemble humans but for one small detail: instead of a neck and head they carry on their shoulders their sexual organs, while they use the heads growing on the lower parts of their bodies for excretion and procreation. Mulloy made full use of this "scandalous" and "catastrophic" interchange (including the disgust of Zog inhabitants at the sight of humans). Moreover, he resorts to the most ordinary props, and in consequence his sci-fi comes close to a hoax.

Hoax

Flying Nansen - Igor Kovalyev A really unique example of the genre is the brilliant prank FLYING NANSEN by the well-known hoaxer Igor Kovalyev. This is a variation on a Nordic theme. The Norwegian explorer Frederik Nansen sets out for the North Pole, which he wants to conquer for his king - and there, naturally, a woman is waiting for him, as is the case of all Kovalyev's philandering heroes. A simple and extraordinarily impressive art treatment and animation make the most of the sliding movement of skis and of surprises, which literally fall from heaven (e.g. a pair of parachutists). Love and marital affairs are on the Pole even more absurd than in Kovalyev's earlier pictures. This approach, however, somewhat plays down the second (moralising parody) plane known from Kovalyev's previous films, e.g. HEN, HIS WIFE. It would be interesting to know whether Kovalyev chose his environment so as to highlight absurdity or whether he simply had in mind some famous amorous escapades of polar explorers. Needless to say, with its 150 films the section of animation at the Leipzig Festival was not restricted to the screening of competition films. However, as the reader may have gathered from this article, in the crucial year 2000 the competition was in a way a compendium, which included not only the main trends, but also the most avant-garde exploits recently seen in animation. To find "a common denominator" in colourful and highly diverse currents and trends of contemporary animation, as Otto Alder says in the catalogue, "is all but impossible". However, Leipzig most certainly succeeded in presenting in all their contradictions and complexities.

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